DOCBOOK-APPS: Then Why Use DocBook? (Re: DocBook with AbiWord?)

["Matt G." <matt_g_@hotmail.com>]

>From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
>Subject: Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: DocBook with AbiWord?
>Date:
>
>At 1:59 PM +0800 1/10/02, Rafael 'Dido' Sevilla wrote:
>>That's the point.  Any WYSIWYG processor will by necessity wind
>>up using docbook as a formatting language, which is most
>>definitely NOT what docbook was designed to be.
>
>I do not know what ABIWord does, but I don't think this as fundamentally 
>impossible as you claim.

Not impossible; just a bad idea.  :)   Seriously, it misses the point.  If 
you hide semantic information from people, do you think they're going to be 
as disciplined about providing it?  If not, then what's the point of using 
DocBook as the native format for a document?

Plus, I think it'd take me longer to take my hand off the keyboard, move it 
over to my mouse, select a bit of text, and pick through some context menu 
and select that I want to mark it as program output, or whatever, then just 
to type the start and end tag names (particularly if I could tab-complete 
them  :).

Also, if you're writing DocBook, you shouldn't *care* what the output looks 
like, except as an additional means of validation that you didn't put some 
tag in the wrong place (which happens infrequently, thanks to the DocBook 
DTD's design and XML's tree-structured nature).


>The word processor could use CSS to show what things looked like
>when various styles were applied. CSS could even be used to apply custom 
>formatting to particular elements by referencing their ID. However, when I 
>said I wanted to make a paragraph red, the editor
>would add a rule to the stylesheet instead of making any changes
>to the document.

But why would you want to make a paragraph red?  Probably because it has 
different semantics than the surrounding paragraphs.  By supplying 
formatting in a presentational, case-by-case fashion, that information is 
lost.  If this loss doesn't bother you, then why constrain yourself to 
DocBook, as an authoring format?

In fact, not only is the semantic information lost, but even the 
presentation information is completely removed from the document!


Please understand that I'm not trying to say "DocBook: good; WYSIWYG: bad".  
I just think that the solution must sufficiently satisfy the requirements.

I also think that people make things a lot harder for themselves than 
necessary, in seeking easy-to-use tools that try to hide too much.  Instead 
of having a fairly even distribution of complexity, such tools tend to 
result in easy (and some difficult) things being absolutely trivial, while 
just about everything else is rendered impossible.  Therefore, I think 
developers of such tools often do users a disservice, by falsely advertising 
the tool as something to make a task universally easier, rather than 
properly qualifying the tool's limitations and assumptions about its usage 
model.  Often, such authors make mistaken assumptions about the needs of the 
user community, so leaving them unstated can be quite costly.

Partially out of frustration with this model, I switched to UNIX, which 
gives me a large number of simple, powerful tools that often do their job 
*very* well.  From these, I build an environment that's specifically 
tailored to my needs.


Okay, I think I've made my views sufficiently clear, regarding this thread.  
I'll try to shut up, now.


Matt Gruenke


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