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I was curious about this myself recently and a conversation with my wife managed to clarify it a bit for me. She's very technically proficient but is not a hac
by vec 12y ago
I was curious about this myself recently and a conversation with my wife managed to clarify it a bit for me. She's very technically proficient but is not a hacker. She also uses Word for almost everything, which drives me crazy, but I think I understand why now.
To her content and presentation are not separate entities. Font choice, heading size, margins and spacing, and colors are secondary to the text and the document structure, but they're still semantic elements and carry meaning above and beyond the structure they present. Presenting a sentence in red, for example, conveys a different meaning than making the same sentence bold, even if in theory they're simply alternate ways of conveying importance. She judges the extra expressiveness to be worth the extra complexity, even for informal documents and notes to herself.
- jarcane 12y agoThis is why I loved Markdown when I first discovered it. Even without it, a lot of my plaintext files do things like the * for emphasis, or using dashes to underline headers and so forth. It's been done in software documentation for decades (a lot of the Markdown syntax isn't even original to it); it puzzles me it took so long for someone to sit down and just write something to use it explicitly.
- agumonkey 12y agoWhat enforced my appreciation for separation of concerns was software instability. How would she react if Word crashed randomly every 30 minutes (nothing unusual in 95-era). I couldn't stand formatting/layout bugs wasting the time to type. So I naturally delayed formatting until my whole text was in and save safely. Only then I would create a copy with added styles.