Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: DocBook with AbiWord?

[Daniel Veillard <veillard@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 03:37:37PM -0500, Norman Walsh wrote:
> / Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu> was heard to say:
> | I do not know what ABIWord does, but I don't think this as
> | fundamentally impossible as you claim. All that's needed is a standard
> | word processor interface, except that instead of menu items like
> | italic we have menu items like  emphasis.
> 
> That's only half the battle. The tricky bit is knowing the schema of
> the document type that you're editing. If I have my cursor "between"
> two paragraphs and I try to insert emphasis, it's got to know that
> either (1) I can't or (2) some additional markup (perhaps a containing
> para) is implied.
> 
> And it has to do this in a way that users don't find totally annoying
> or totally inexplicable.

  Yep, that was the serious problem each time a new user was introduced
to Thot (structured editor based on the same core as Amaya and the now
defunct Grif SGML editor), all of them seeing a GUI just expected it to
behave like WordPerfect or Word would, and either they managed to accept
the constraints of the structures (taking usually 3 weeks of learning) or
they just dropped it arguing its usability was insane (true too :-).
  Very few could actually accept the rigidity due to the document structure
and associated constraints. The problem is not technical, but nearly social
people expect the tools to fit their needs, not obey some technical
requirements ... Good (and cheap) GUI for structured editing are IMHO still
an open challenge (and why so many of us still use Emacs or Vi :-)

Daniel

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