Current trends in Authoring Tools?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Janice Gelb notes: <<I find it ironic that when I first got into the  
biz, writers used coding to indicate to the typesetter where to  
change fonts and so on. Then the WYSIWYG tools came out and everyone  
said "Look, we can control the appearance ourselves and see our  
changes right away! Coding is clunky and old-fashioned!" Then 15  
years later, everyone acted like it was a revolutionary trend: "Look!  
We can use coding and have non-proprietary document exchange!">>

Sadly, though not quite as ancient as Janice <gdrlh>, I'm well on my  
own way to decrepitude: I can still remember manually tagging text in  
AtariWriter, and later in IBM's Bookmaster. <g> I also loved the  
ability to view codes in WordPerfect and manually fix up any  
formatting bugs, and remember how appalled I was when I learned how  
bizarrely Word encoded its text formats in .doc files.

I'm very much looking forward to open standards such as XML, though  
it's appalling that Microsoft has once again tried to coopt the  
standards process by introducing its own proprietary format when a  
perfectly good standard already existed. Will we be able to manually  
edit the tags in .docx? I hope so, but wouldn't bet on it.


----------------------------------------------------
-- Geoff Hart
ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca / geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com
www.geoff-hart.com
--------------------------------------------------
Coming soon:  _Effective onscreen editing_ (http://www.geoff-hart.com/ 
home/onscreen-book.htm)

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