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Subject:RE: Why WYSIWYG for XML??? From:Mailing List <mlist -at- ca -dot- safenet-inc -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 18 May 2004 12:05:56 -0400
About writers insisting on WYSIWYG and the ability to
tinker for semantic markup, Gene Kim-Eng sez:
> Hell, I've gotten that just trying to get people to
> work within a standard template in Frame or Word
> without tinkering with the formatting for individual
> documents.
> As for the "why WYSIWYG," my guess is that the vast
> majority of people working in XML see one delivery
> format or another, whether print or web or whatever,
> as their "primary," everything else as "something
> else," and want to work in WYSIWYG for their "primary"
> format. Hardly anyone I work with, including most
> web designers, tells me they prefer to work with raw
> markup code anymore. It's all part of the idea that
> the tool should not take more of your attention than
> your actual project does. So the challenge for anyone
> attempting to sell a "blue sky" XML tool is how to give
> writers whose "primary" format is print with a WP
> interface while also providing web designers with
> web page authoring UIs, etc., etc.
It might be as simple as:
SOME people (while not the world's best) are reasonably
good at writing content, and reasonably good at making
it look the way it should, and they've been doing both
for years.
Suddenly, you want to take away part of their jobs,
a part that they might have enjoyed. "You are a cog.
We have other specialist cogs who do what you formerly
did. Confine yourself to single-function cog-ness,
and like it. Have a nice day."
/kevin
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