Re: Tag markup going away?

[David Mitchell <mitchell -at- SOLAR -dot- SKY -dot- NET>]

>> tag markup has had its day.  It surely can not be long before someone
 produces a WYSIWYG web editor.  <Gary
>> Conroy>gazza -at- ITL -dot- NET

> Do you really think they'll come up with a viable alternative? What with the
 multitude of platforms that access
> the web (PC, Mac, and Unix, along with many others), I don't know if there
 *is* an alternative to tagging, which
> relies on the cross-platform ASCII and SGML formats.... Any opinions on this
 one?  <David
> Castro>techwrtr -at- crl -dot- com

Perhaps tagging and platform independent codes are here to stay.  However,
 editors that mask the manual tagging
are common.  I think that any tagging language gets in the way of writing.  When
 I work in a markup language
(usually IPF) I try to do my writing at one time and my tagging at another.
 Otherwise, I end up saying to myself,
"Oh, I know the tag is this, but what is the syntax?"  Then I look up the syntax
 and my train of thought is
interrupted.

This contrasts when I work in WYSIWYG editors.  When I write Windows Help, as
 opposed to IPF, I work in Microsoft
Word.  I find the page description language of RTF to be more intuitive and
 fitting with my writing.  That is, I
can format a paragraph as I write it without breaking my thought process.

This is all, of couse, highly subjective.  In a markup language, the closest to
 WYSIWYG is
what-you-see-is-what-you-could-get.  I still find this "one possible output"
 mode to be more intuitive, if not as
accurate as straight markup codes.

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David Mitchell (mitchell -at- sky -dot- net)                      David's Web Spot
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