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


Hi,

My previous message was sent in parallel with some other responses and I'd
like to make two points to some of them.

Making clear that my opinions come from my real live experiences:

1) I agree with Elliotte that "too many icons spoil the soup" ;-). It's been
proved that keying commands is faster (and more productive) than moving the
mouse, no matter if it's for selecting a menu option or clicking an icon.

2) Javier, from my experience, people (at an organization) don't move from
Word to "something else" because they find this new tool offers "something"
better. If that were the case 90% of organizations would be using some kind
of structured editing!! You have to really "push" "decision-makers" and
"end-users" to do the "transition", mainly because most of the advantages
for structure editing are long term (and for end-users is a short term
head-ache!).

Just an anecdote: I'm trying to convince my colleagues to move from LaTex
(structured text) to DocBook. No way!! 

Regards,

Pedro

-----Mensaje original-----
De: Javi [mailto:spanish@inicia.es] 
Enviado el: miércoles, 03 de octubre de 2007 10:54
CC: DocBook Apps Mailing List
Asunto: Re: [docbook-apps] oXygen 9 beta with WYSIWYG-like editing
supportfor DocBook

Dave wrote:
> For users used to M$ Word it is quite a transition. 'Leading' them 
> gently  from bold and underline and italic to semantic markup should 
> be made as easy as possible, even if it upsets the hard line semantic 
> folks.
Elliotte wrote:
> However I do think that if the user just wants to do simple bolding 
> and italicizing of text, then they just want to do presentation-based, 
> non-semantic markup. And indeed they probably do want that, and that's 
> OK. But if so they should be using Word, not DocBook.
I must totally agree with Elliotte. I do usually agree with Dave in most 
of his ideas, but not in this one. If someone wants to write a 
presentation-based document, DocBook is not a good selection. There are 
much better things for this (quark, pagemaker, even word or openoffice). 
There doesn't exist the right thing for everyone, the program everyone 
will use.

I think, Dave, the idea is a change or perspective. You say, to make a 
gentle transition from Word to DocBook, let's make the markup less 
semantic so we come closer to Word.

Let me give you another perspective. If someone is using Word and he 
thinks about using some other tool, it's because Word doesn't give him 
what he wants. If he chooses DocBook it will be due to it's semantic 
markup and the separation between presentation and structure. You can't 
then offer him a tool with the same options as his old one.

I accept that oXygen people have a challenge, how to make this 
transition a gentle experience. But I don't think the way is to diminish 
the power of the tool and of the underlying model. Novel ideas and 
imagination will win in this task, don't get always the effortless way.

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