[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Re: Are the publishing users happy? Why not?
At 06:40 PM 2/18/2003 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote: >ndw@n... (Norman Walsh) writes: > >And yet I've watched [writers] spend hours tinkering with formatting in > >their WYSIWYG tools, despite the fact they've been told that all the > >formatting is going to get discarded. > >A well-designed set of labeled styles can help a lot here, actually. I >find that many of these writers really want their prose to _look_ like >it will on the final printed page, and that desire can be used to lure >them down the path of labeled structures. Character-level habits are >much harder to break than paragraph-level habits, but there's occasional >cause for hope In the markup community, we would like people to think more abstractly. There's two problems we have to overcome: "Every time you introduce a layer of abstraction, you lose 90% of the audience" -- Adam Bosworth "Most men prefer a beautiful woman to an intelligent woman, because they can see better than they can think." -- Gloria Steinem Most people would rather look at four-color graphs than tables of numbers. Most people can understand a well-formatted document, it appeals to their eyes. Our GUIs need to leverage this somehow if we want to persuade people to write well-structured markup. The abstractions we care about have to be supported by compelling visual metaphors. Jonathan
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