Re: DSSSL and WYSIWYG Editing

At 9:45 PM 5/9/97, Terry Crowley wrote:
>>  You can have multiple views without one being "structured" and the other
>>  "presentational". Standard word processors have "draft" and "preview"
>>  modes. With more powerful stylesheet languages the gap between "draft"
>>  and "preview" is larger. In the long term I think that WYSIWYG will take
>>  a back seat to interface clarity and power.
>>
>>  In these cases, WYSIWYG would make the interface harder to navigate and
>>  harder to use. In the long run I expect WYSIWYG to gradually become less
>>  and less interesting. Graphical views of documents are important, but
>>  views that are exactly the same as readers are not really so important.
>
>Wow.  Better put a huge caveat on the above statements.  Whose your target
>user?  Sure, if it's someone whose writing content all day where the ability to
>control layout easily for the document as a whole is important, the stylesheet
>view is important.  For the other 99% of users, they just want something that
>easily allows them to achieve the effect they're trying to achieve.  Using a
>stylesheet is like programming, and bottom line is that most users of composing
>tools don't want to be programmers.  Using a stylesheet requires planning, and
>most users don't want to plan.  They just want to write their content.

Quite contrary, using stylesheets require *less* planning than WYSIWYG.
With a WYSIWYG approach the author/designer will have to plan the
appearance in advance, then do the job. With a stylesheet approach, the
author will do some analysis of document structure but will be free to play
with the style at any time without planning. It is the stylesheet approach
that allow authors just to write their content.

-- Terje <Terje@in-progress.com> | Media Design in*Progress

   Interaction makes editing Cascading Style Sheets easy...
   Info:     http://interaction.in-progress.com/components/style
   MacWorld: http://www.macworld.com/daily/daily.1272.html
   MacWeek:  http://www8.zdnet.com/macweek/mw_1118/gw_cascade.html

Received on Sunday, 11 May 1997 17:58:57 UTC