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

[Scott Hudson <scott.hudson@flatironssolutions.com>]

I agree with Michael. oXygen isn't just for editing DocBook. It's an 
all-purpose XML editor. Different standards will have different element 
names for the same basic semantic. <Emphasis role="bold"> in DocBook is 
the equivalent of <b> in DITA and HTML, and ODF and MS OpenXML will have 
their equivalents as well. Thanks to the widespread use of MS Word and 
MANY other editors, the conventional button is a bold "B". Same goes for 
  italic and underline.

Part of the purpose for adding WYSIWYG or visual, styled editing 
features to oXygen, is to make the tool (and XML for that matter) more 
usable by everyday authors. It's not a feature I would expect markup 
geeks to even use that much, since we are so familiar with tags already! 
If this is the case, why are we trying to discourage the use of some 
very familiar and very basic functionality for these buttons?

The oXygen folks will provide a way of mapping element names to these 
buttons, so depending on which DTD/RNG/RNC/XSD you are using, the 
correct element will be inserted. Do we really want an "emphasis 
role='bold'" button? I should think that would be a little clunky in the 
interface.

I would suggest that having the familiar B, I and U buttons is pretty 
harmless in the grand scheme of things, and makes the UI more friendly 
for the general authoring populace.

Best regards,

--Scott



Michael(tm) Smith wrote:
> 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
>