Subject: Reveal codes (was Re: Zero-length Runs and show codes)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Wed Feb 14 2001 - 12:30:19 CST
OK folks, I'm breaking this out into a separate thread, to help isolate any
raging flamewars that may burst out. :-)
To get things started, I'll argue that there are four relevant equivalence
classes of users here:
- HTML users
- Word users
- WordPerfect users
- old-style SGML users
In all four cases, people sometimes like to know how and why their content
got formatted the way it did, so they can tweak it and/or clean it up.
However, the 4 UIs solve this same problem in different (and perhaps
idiosyncratic ways).
Word users ...
--------------
... have been trained to look at a bunch of various GUI indications (such as
toolbar buttons, the style combo, status bar messages, or even property
dialogs) to tell them what the current formatting mode is. Everything is so
WYSIWYG that these folks never feel like they're missing anything.
HTML users ...
--------------
... have been trained to pull up the View Source menu and see the raw markup
as a separate document. Once you learn a little HTML, it's usually not too
hard to follow along and sync the two views. Some HTML editors take
advantage of this and sync the two views (WYSIWYG and markup) automatically.
WordPerfect users ...
---------------------
... have been trained to think of formatting as a consequence of mysterious
control codes which get sprinkled among the characters of their text.
Frequently, the only good way to get rid of unwanted codes is to open up a
separate Reveal Codes pane and nuke them by hand.
old-style SGML users ...
------------------------
... have been trained to focus primarily on the markup, and to despise
WYSIWYG for a host of reasons. Thus, the tools they prefer have UIs which
help manage the complexities of the kinds of markup they're dealing with.
my totally biased opinion
-------------------------
Markup and WYSIWYG just don't mix well in the same UI.
To my mind, the Reveal Codes "feature" is only needed when the rest of your
formatting GUI is so broken that you can't fix your document without it.
But I freely admit to being a Word user. :-)
Likewise, I fall much more on the HTML and lightweight XML side of the camp,
so heavy-duty markup-centric SGML tools aren't useful precedents for me.
Thus, I like the fact that we've got a very clean WYSIWYG interface (which
will please the Word users), plus an HTMLish file format which can be viewed
under the hood if you really care. That gives us two alternate UIs for
understanding what's happening with the underlying markup.
While it's possible to envision and implement UI solutions in a WYSIWYG word
processor that look like WordPerfect or SGML interfaces for displaying *and
reliably editing* other markup, I haven't seen one I like. The words "ugly"
and "brittle" usually come to mind. ;-)
Paul,
UI fanatic
At 10:44 AM 2/14/01 -0500, Randy Kramer wrote:
>Jesper Skov wrote:
>> o I also plan to make some changes to the use of attributes in the
>> backend that should eventually allow us to show <font>, <bold> etc
>> in the text and make those editable... Just like in WP5. This will
>> also result in a leaner backend representation and possibly a small
>> speedup.
>
>I think we should gather several opinions on this. In Word, things like
>font and bold do not show up in any "show codes" view. The Tools |
>Options | View | Nonprinting Characters | All (View All for short) is
>(AFAIK) the closest thing to it (in combination with the style
>"combobox" on the toolbar) .
>
>View All shows paragraph marks (the backwards P), newline marks (the
>carriage return character), spaces (as "light" elevated dots), tabs (as
>right arrows -->), and things like section, page, and column breaks.
>
>It is usually easy to tell that a character or group of characters is
>bold, italic, underlined, superscript, etc. because you can see it.
>And, if you've applied the bold, italic or whatever by applying a named
>character style to the characters, you will see the style name in the
>style combobox when you have (only) characters selected that have that
>named style applied.
>
>I guess this is one of the fundamental differences between Word and, for
>example Word Perfect. I am probably jumping the gun on sending this --
>Paul will surely have some words of wisdom about how he expected to
>handle this point. If the decision were to show markup like <bold>
></bold>, I think that I'd like to have a way to view paragraph and
>newline marks, and page and section break indicators, without being
>forced to also view any <bold> </bold> markup.
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