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From: wjin@cs.uh.edu (Woody Jin)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Command languages versus GUIs.
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 96 16:01:45 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Houston
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Message-ID: <4liumn$iig@masala.cc.uh.edu>
References: <4ki055$60l@Radon.Stanford.EDU> <4lgo70$t3r@masala.cc.uh.edu> <4lgv09$3a5@web.nmti.com> <4lhfcf$s8m@masala.cc.uh.edu> <4lisou$2kf@web.nmti.com>
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In article <4lisou$2kf@web.nmti.com>, peter@nmti.com (Peter da Silva) wrote:
>Right... BUT the original threads that got me into this discussion were
>claiming that there was some fundamental conflict between CLIs and GUIs,
>and that GUIs let you avoid having to deal with a CLI at all. That's
>just not true. The user interface, and the underlying tools, are separate
>issues.
I agree with your above opinion. However,
>The problems I have with Word come in two parts:
>
> 1. Using the WYSIWYG interface doesn't help you learn about the
> underlying implementation. So rather than a moderately steep
> learning curve that provides you with more and more capabilities
> as you go along, you have a shallow curve that suddenly hits
> a brick wall when you need more capability... and as you approach
> that asymptote the amount of macdinking goes through the roof.
The same thing can be said about LaTeX or troff -ms users.
Most of them only know how to use \section{}, \figure{}, \cite{}, \itemize{},
\verbatim{},...etc. which is nothing more than buttons on WYSIWYG
word processors. When they are faced with odd situations, for example,
the figure appears on one page but the caption appears on next page
or the figure is not located in an appropriate places, they don't know
what to do. I know many people who spent more than a few months
just for fixing their LaTeX documents, but eventually they couldn't.
The same is true for troff -ms users. When I used it, I never intended to
hack troff even though I knew some basics of troff to use ms (I simply asked
around if I am in odd situation :) )
> 2. Once you've become used to using style sheets, the WYSIWYG
> interface isn't very attractive any more. And you can't get
> rid of it. Like... I don't *care* that level 2 headings are
> curently in helvetica-bold-condensed. I'll probably change
> that after I've had a chance to look over the first draft.
This is very true.
Unfortunate thing is that most people don't care. They think, "I need
some specific big fancy fonts because this is heading", rather than
"this is (semantically) heading".
I hope that future word processors use internal representations to
have such semantics. I don't think that this is impossible.
Maybe some word proecessors might have already using them.
--
Woody Jin
Love is what love does - from Road Less Traveled, M. Peck, 1978
Stupid is what stupid does - from Forrest Gump, 1995
Vi is what vi does,
emacs is what emacs does - me, 1996