On 23 December 2010 10:55, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 23 December 2010 10:43, Tony Sidaway
<tonysidaway(a)gmail.com> wrote:
To clarify my skepticism, the complexity of
Wikipedia doesn't arise at
the user interface level at all but at the level of social
interaction. This is unavoidable because you're dealing with other
human beings, not a machine. The complexity is necessary, even
desirable, for exactly the same reason.
True. However, the markup is really an important way to put off the
n00bs. People who are used to wikitext don't believe it, and say "but
I'd think that XXX" - but here's the data point:
You've convinced me. This in particular:
"[CKEditor] very closely matches the experience non-technical people have gotten
used to
while using Word or WordPerfect. Leveraging skills people already have
cuts down on training costs and allows them to be productive almost
immediately."
For me WYSIWYG is synonymous with annoying stuff that gets in the way
of the code I want to write, and of course I take it as read that the
code stands for a procedural or functional abstraction of what the
computer is supposed to do. I don't find it difficult, but then I've
been doing it since I was in the lower sixth at school when I had to
type computer instructions on a teletype connected to a land line by
acoustic coupler.
Not everybody works that way. Most of us don't. To those people the
buttons I find annoying may be the only thing they *do* understand,
they're the most accessible way of using a computer, and a user
interface lacking those buttons is alien and incomprehensible. With
the buttons, these people are intuitively able to produce a reasonable
minimal subset of tasks immediately as long as the result of their
work is displayed immediately (WYSIWYG).
It's still annoying, though.