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At 06:40 PM 2/18/2003 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>ndw@nwalsh.com (Norman Walsh) writes:
> >And yet I've watched [writers] spend hours tinkering with formatting in
> >their WYSIWYG tools, despite the fact they've been told that all the
> >formatting is going to get discarded.
>
>A well-designed set of labeled styles can help a lot here, actually. I
>find that many of these writers really want their prose to _look_ like
>it will on the final printed page, and that desire can be used to lure
>them down the path of labeled structures. Character-level habits are
>much harder to break than paragraph-level habits, but there's occasional
>cause for hope
In the markup community, we would like people to think more abstractly.
There's two problems we have to overcome:
"Every time you introduce a layer of abstraction,
you lose 90% of the audience"
-- Adam Bosworth
"Most men prefer a beautiful woman to an intelligent woman,
because they can see better than they can think."
-- Gloria Steinem
Most people would rather look at four-color graphs than tables of numbers.
Most people can understand a well-formatted document, it appeals to their
eyes. Our GUIs need to leverage this somehow if we want to persuade people
to write well-structured markup. The abstractions we care about have to be
supported by compelling visual metaphors.
Jonathan
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