That makes perfect sense, and that is exactly the rationale behind LaTeX (and other such typesetting software). Good documents have good structure; WYSIWYG is not intended to foster good structure, it's designed to foster looking pretty. While looking pretty is nice, it should never come at the expense of form. If you have good structure the rest can come along behind.
Mike
-----Original Message----- From: Delphine Ménard [mailto:notafishz@gmail.com] Sent: September 25, 2008 1:55 PM To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Can anyone really edit Wikipedia?
On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 17:48, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2008/9/25 Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com:
For what it's worth, I think WYSIWYG is evil. But there is probably a middle path between cluttered text and Word-like unstructuration.
It shouldn't be worse than wikitext - wikitext isn't any more structured than Word. It's a display markup code that translates into HTML, not a document structure code.
Maybe not, but it mostly forces some kind of structure if you want it to look "pretty". Which WYSIWYG doesn't. You can just bold up stuff and make it size 40 and it looks like a header, but isn't one. That's what I mean with "structure", if that make sense.
Delphine