Re: AWEB; Enhanced Document Encoding

[Sven Utcke <utcke@tu-harburg.de>]

"Nick Roberts" <Nick.Roberts@dial.pipex.com> writes:

> I also suspect, perhaps, he is not being deeply serious, 

Me?  Never!

> (And as for Windows crashing: my Windows 95 PC crashed yesterday, losing me
> a large e-mail I was just about to send.  It's a fairly regular occurrence.
> 'Nuff said.)

About 30 minutes ago...

> I think Sven must misunderstand my point about the control characters.  Yes,
> you need them (and even then, not all) for old-style character
> communications, but you don't need them, except a few, for anything else.  A
> text document file could certainly get away with using the control
> characters (or most of them) for other purposes.  If you needed to
> communicate such a file somewhere, you'd send it as a binary file.  No
> problem!  (If you need to process it as plain text, you must put it through
> an appropriate filter; also not really a problem.)

Granted.  But why do you want to get rid of them?  With unicode, it's
not as if there were a shortage of characters available...

> Finally, Sven confirms his hatred of all things WYSIWYG.  Might projects
> such as LyX change his mind?  

Nope.  I realise we will have to install it in order to get students
to use (La)TeX, but it's really not the right way to do things.  About
95% of all TeX-related questions I answer have to do with the fact
that people try do to WYSIWYG things in LaTeX, things that seem to
look good (to the untrained eye) but are really just breaking the
internal logic of the document (independent from the wordprocessor).
LaTeX usually tries hard to stop them, hence the problems...

> I used to be pretty contemptuous myself of
> typical WYSIWYG word processors*, most of which were suitable only for
> letters and trivial documents, once.  

As far as I can tell WinWord still isn't ueable for any longer or more
complicated documents...

> But I observe and listen to many other
> computer users in my job (roving consultant), and most of them love WYSIWYG,
> and the immediacy of typical GUIs.  

It gives a person the feeling to be "in control" --- certainly not
something you'll ever get from (La)TeX.  The problem is that this will
put people in control of typesetting (which, after all, is a real job
which it takes three years to learn) who have absolutely no clue, and
with the results you would expect...

> As a programmer, I feel I must bow to
> the needs of the majority.  Also, I must admit, I like it a lot -- if I am
> trying to use a program I have never used before and will never use often --
> when I can get the program to do what I want straight away by just pulling
> down a menu or two.  (Of course, only the best 5% odd of GUI programs are
> this well designed, in reality; but the principle stands.)  

I don't think so.  for any moderately complex program you'll usually
have to understand the basic concepts before being able to do any
usefull work with it.  Which requires you to read, at least, a short
introduction... 

Sven
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