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That’s a problem that no WYSIWYG has been able to solve yet. It’s probably an unavoidable abstraction leakage. Hence the unbelievable popularity of markdown.
by tambourine_man 6y ago
That’s a problem that no WYSIWYG has been able to solve yet. It’s probably an unavoidable abstraction leakage.
Hence the unbelievable popularity of markdown.
Imagine telling your 90s self your current machine configuration and how awesome it is. Then explain that we, with all this tech, voluntarily chose to type in plaintext format, with notations that kind of work as a more readable form of markup language, because we got fed up trying to make WYSIWYG work.
Oh yes, and GUIs are for noobs, pros use terminal emulators, but that’s another topic :)
- Lio 6y agoMy 90s self had already been using GUIs since the 80s courtesy of systems like Acorn RiscOS, Amiga, MacOS and even Windows 2. The thing is I still enjoyed using quality DOS and Unix terminal software. GUIs are not the one true way to represent a UI. They’re not even new technology any more. They’re just different and better suited to certain tasks but not others. It’s like asking why are we still using steering wheels to drive instead of speech recognition?
- projektfu 6y agoFrameMaker had this stuff figured out.
- tambourine_man 6y agoYou don’t deal with PostScript directly. PostScript is akin to assembly.
- madhadron 6y ago> That’s a problem that no WYSIWYG has been able to solve yet. It’s probably an unavoidable abstraction leakage. I think it comes from conflating layout with writing. In QuarkXPress or InDesign it really isn't an issue. Those tools are quite uncomfortable for sitting to write in, though. LyX does a decent job of this, I think, though it's not exactly WYSIWYG.
- tambourine_man 6y agoYou’re probably onto something. There’s also an issue with black box language vs something like HTML, which has semantic value besides pure presentational function. I don’t care if the auto generated PostScript is ugly as long as the printed work is perfect.
- btilly 6y agoMy 90s self had experienced both LaTeX and Microsoft Word. I fled from Visual Basic to vi and Perl. I would have been easy to convince.