Plain text plus
Dec. 15th, 2005 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinBrad DeLong's lament about Word leads to a bunch of people piling on modern computer interfaces and longing for simpler days.
I say what I've said before (particularly in the comments to that post): it seems to me that the ideal document-writing interface is not plain text and not WYSIWYG, but something in between that is character-based but lets you insert simple markup like bold, italics, superscripts, etc. and see some visual representation of that if you want. Something, in short, like an early 1980s word processor, or a modern blogging client's editor.
What I don't know is whether this strikes me as obviously superior because it is logically superior, or because I was introduced to writing on a computer in the age of Wordstar.
I say what I've said before (particularly in the comments to that post): it seems to me that the ideal document-writing interface is not plain text and not WYSIWYG, but something in between that is character-based but lets you insert simple markup like bold, italics, superscripts, etc. and see some visual representation of that if you want. Something, in short, like an early 1980s word processor, or a modern blogging client's editor.
What I don't know is whether this strikes me as obviously superior because it is logically superior, or because I was introduced to writing on a computer in the age of Wordstar.
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 06:54 am (UTC)XJournal's HTML Preview window auto-updates while the HTML codes remain visible in the actual edit window. But HTML, while OK for many purposes, isn't ideal as a human-readable code display; something more succinct like wikitext or Markdown would be better. (NOT phpBB's weird markup, which is about as verbose as HTML but harder to use because of the editor's "helpful" interventions.)