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/u/matj1
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People often complain about MS Word and argue about which alternative is better, LO Writer, Google Docs or Pages. But all these are based on the same ideas about document editing, and these ideas are flawed, and I think that it was a mistake that this paradigm became mainstream.
Setting: These editors present only the visual side of the document, and the structure is hidden. So people who do not know how these editors work make documents with inconsistent structure. I have encountered too many long documents with inconsistent structure, and something breaks in them, or people change their mind and want to reformat them. Because the structure is inconsistent, the only viable way is to redo the whole document manually.
Flaw in the idea: Ideally, the structure of the content would be separate from the visual presentation, and, when people decide that they want it to look different, they just tweak the visual style. Styles already exist, but they are considered an advanced feature, so most people treat them at best as an afterthought. What these editors do wrong is that they do not motivate users to use styles as a basic feature. The editors should present the document as a structure first. There are exceptions. When someone makes a poster, how it looks is important, so the visual side is primary. But these editors are intended mainly for text documents with mostly regular structure and length commonly in dozens of pages, so the documents should be represented by the structure.
Ideal solution: Latex and such are formats capturing the structure much better, but they are not suited for casual users. I imagine that document editors would ideally have workflow similar to MS Word, but they would have toolbars with structural elements like emphasis, heading and list instead of visual like italic, font size and color. They would also visualize structural elements for example as boxes or nested list like Inspect in most web browsers, showing which element relates to which. Visual styling would be fine by that the editors would not present visual settings of the individual elements, but they would make the users assign visual styles to classes of elements.
submitted by /u/matj1
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Setting: These editors present only the visual side of the document, and the structure is hidden. So people who do not know how these editors work make documents with inconsistent structure. I have encountered too many long documents with inconsistent structure, and something breaks in them, or people change their mind and want to reformat them. Because the structure is inconsistent, the only viable way is to redo the whole document manually.
Flaw in the idea: Ideally, the structure of the content would be separate from the visual presentation, and, when people decide that they want it to look different, they just tweak the visual style. Styles already exist, but they are considered an advanced feature, so most people treat them at best as an afterthought. What these editors do wrong is that they do not motivate users to use styles as a basic feature. The editors should present the document as a structure first. There are exceptions. When someone makes a poster, how it looks is important, so the visual side is primary. But these editors are intended mainly for text documents with mostly regular structure and length commonly in dozens of pages, so the documents should be represented by the structure.
Ideal solution: Latex and such are formats capturing the structure much better, but they are not suited for casual users. I imagine that document editors would ideally have workflow similar to MS Word, but they would have toolbars with structural elements like emphasis, heading and list instead of visual like italic, font size and color. They would also visualize structural elements for example as boxes or nested list like Inspect in most web browsers, showing which element relates to which. Visual styling would be fine by that the editors would not present visual settings of the individual elements, but they would make the users assign visual styles to classes of elements.
submitted by /u/matj1
[link] [comments]
Continue reading...