Re: [docbook-apps] oXygen 9 beta with WYSIWYG-like editing supportfor DocBook

[George Cristian Bina <george@oxygenxml.com>]

Dear Eliotte,

Thank you for your remark.
The Bold, Italic and Underline actions are part of the customization we 
defined as default for DocBook and they were added like that considering 
that people are very familiar with the *B*, /I/ and _U_ type of icons 
and they were added as shortcuts to insert different emphasis levels.
I understand your point and we should correct the name and description 
tool tips for these actions (they read now Bold, Italic and Underline) 
to clearly specify that they insert emphasis.

I agree that we should add actions to insert elements as you suggested 
with appropriate icons in the version 9 release so suggestions on the 
elements that should be provided by default in the oXygen 9 support for 
DocBook and possible actions are more than welcome.

The whole customization support is configurable and one can define or 
remove actions as one likes - but yes, the default that we provide 
should be more focused on the semantics of the language as most people 
will use that.

Thanks again for your useful feedback!

Best Regards,
George
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George Cristian Bina - http://aboutxml.blogspot.com/
<oXygen/> XML Editor, Schema Editor and XSLT Editor/Debugger
http://www.oxygenxml.com


Elliotte Harold wrote:
> George Cristian Bina wrote:
> 
>> - Bold, Italic, Underline actions (insert emphasis with different role 
>> attributes)
> 
> 
> I'm sorry. This is just wrong. We may want a WYSIWYG display, but we 
> don't want a WYSIWYG interface.  Moving away from WYSIWYG interfaces is 
> what SGML, XML, and markup have always been about.
> 
> The interface should allow us to choose emphasis, strong emphasis, 
> wordasword, foreignterm, variable, etc. It should not present us with 
> options for Bold, Italic, and Underline.
> 
> What is shown on the screen need not be tags. Indeed it's quite useful 
> if they're not. The document can be rendered in bold, italic, or 
> whatever style is appropriate. That's fine. However, the user should be 
> asked to specify what they mean, not what they want something to look 
> like. Otherwise you might as well be using Word.
> 
>