This is an interesting article and has generated some good discussion, but blaming Word for mixing style sheets and control codes seems off to me. > Arguments

This is an interesting article and has generated some good discussion, but blaming Word for mixing style sheets and control codes seems off to me. > Arguments raged internally: should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible and you can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there. Back in the 80s and early 90s, WordPerfect was the market leader - not MS Word. And WordPerfect 5.0 supported style sheets when it was released in the 80s, alongside the existing control codes that were already a core feature of WP.[1] Even after it supported WYSIWYG editing, WP still enabled users to Reveal Codes - essentially toggling from WYSIWYG to the underlying markup. I'm not defending MS Word as a program - I hate it too. I wish WordPerfect or something better had won. But I don't see how Microsoft alone can be blamed for deciding to support both control codes and style sheets. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Styles_and_style_libraries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Styles_and_style_li...