On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 3:31 AM, Dmitriy Sintsov questpc@rambler.ru wrote:
So it would be menu and icon-driven editing, where the hands should move from keyboard to mouse and vice versa, like MS Word. Not very handy for programmers and people who prefer to do most of tasks in command line.
Programmers rank far, far below normal people when it comes to usability prioritization. Programmers can use WYSIWYG just as well as anyone else, even if it's not as powerful as they'd like. FWIW, on forums I go to where I can use either BB code or WYSIWYG, I use WYSIWYG most of the time -- it's just more convenient. I only resort to BB code to work around deficiencies in the WYSIWYG editor.
Even for programmers, learning a new syntax is a significant issue. A few months ago I spoke to a programmer I know who tried editing Wikipedia a few times. He got lost in the wikitext. He knew he could figure out how to make the correction he wanted if he had to, but in practice, he just gave up without putting in the effort. It was too much of a barrier to entry to overcome his weak interest in fixing the error he saw.
As far as I'm concerned, a situation in which WYSIWYG is the only supported editing method would be far superior to the current situation. If we could allow power users to edit manually, that would be a nice bonus. Note that even if we use a format like XML that's a pain to manually edit, programmers can write up their own front-ends if they like -- they're programmers, after all! And also note that as with most WYSIWYG editors, there would presumably be a slew of keyboard shortcuts for power users to memorize if they didn't want to use the mouse.