This article, Structured Data and
This article, Structured Data and the death of WYSIWYG [glommed from CamWorld], hits on some important distinctions, such as the difference between how “classes” of computer users interact with document creation software and the difficulty and bloat of contemporary word processors that have buried all logical structures beneath the WYSIWYG environment. For example:
“The two camps remain, the technical writers with their structured formats, and Emacs or, if their employer is rich, Framemaker/SGML, and the office workers with their MS word, userfriendly, as long as the macrovirus doesn’t get you, and your hardware is fast enough.
But does it have to be that way? It seems that structured formats clearly solve a lot of the problems people have with WYSIWYG: It lets you concentrate on what you write, not how it looks, it’s easy to get all your documents to follow a standard, and the semantics generally allow for smarter searching and archiving. But the tools are in the way.”
However, I think some of the conclusions of the author, Joakim Ziegler, are mistaken. For example:
“There’s no accepted norm for displaying XML data while editing. The only approaches we’ve seen are ones like LyX, which comes close to a WYSIWYG approach, and thus is in danger of falling into the same hole as normal WYSIWYG word processors. Also, it’s tricky to edit things like metainformation and the like in a WYSIWYG environment (if you can’t see it, you can’t get it). We went in the opposite direction, providing a visualization of structure.”
I thinkmajor conceptual mistake here is that What You See Is What You Get is inherently What You Can’t See You Can’t Get. The problem with contemporary word processors isn’t that they don’t do structured data, but that they suck at doing structured data. I’m not a programmer, but I’d wager that most “template” features in contemporary word processors are retrofitted structures onto unstructured data.
I think Conglomerate, Ziegler’s product, looks like it is probably on the right track — an XML-based document creation tool that will allow authors to write once, publish anywhere just by varying the DTD.
But I think he’s kidding himself if he thinks this is going to replace Word for the “normal computer user,” anymore than LaTeX or Framemaker would. When it gets right down to it, how it looks is more important to the normal computer user than using structured data to build the document.
What is needed is a system that does XML-editing and allows the users to toggle between editable WYSIWYG views of the various DTDs. That would be a powerful document editing tool!