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

["Michael(tm) Smith" <smith@sideshowbarker.net>]

Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>, 2007-10-02 06:13 -0400:

> 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.

I'm sorry, but I don't see any real-world difference between
"emphasis" and italics, nor "strong emphasis" and bold. In
practice, they amount to the same thing, and pretending that
they're not doesn't really help anybody. But what might help a
little at least is giving people familiar "make this italic" and
"make this bold" functions/buttons in a UI -- since that maps to
what they are likely already familiar with -- instead of trying
to, um, educate them that they need to choose "emphasis" when what
they really want is italics and "strong emphasis" when what they
want it bold.

I agree about the need to provide UI features to choose variable,
etc. But that need is separate to how to handle the cases where a
user really does just want to do simple bolding and italicizing of
text. 

  --Mike

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
http://people.w3.org/mike/
http://sideshowbarker.net/

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