user-defined formatting

["Brierley, Sean" <Sean -at- Quodata -dot- Com>]

Excellent point!

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Sandy Harris [SMTP:sandy -at- storm -dot- ca]
> 
> Not to restart a Holy War, but I want things like page size, font choice,
> etc.
> to be under the control of the user, the application or the stylesheet. I
> think
> having the writer control those, beyond setting reasonable defaults, is a
> serious
> error.
> 
No Holy war needed. But, why would you want this? Surely, in days of old,
printed documentation prevented readers from having these controls. And, do
you not format pages and choose fonts and create stylesheets to deliberately
maximize readability? Does giving up control of these items serve to reduce
your effectiveness and reduce the utility and readability of your document?

For a subset of readers, say a company that takes your product and
accompanying doc set and OEMs the product as its own, I can see a percentage
in this, and in using such things as XML or SGML, but for the majority, is
it useful to give up these controls to the reader?

Cheers,

Sean
sean -at- quodata -dot- com
>  

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