[Foundation-l] Can anyone really edit Wikipedia?

[Delirium]

mikelifeguard at fastmail.fm wrote:
> 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.
>   
As someone who mainly uses LaTeX but also uses Word for academic papers 
(depending on the field), this doesn't make any sense to me. Both LaTeX 
and Word let you do both semantic and pretty-looking stuff. In LaTeX I 
can mark a section title with e.g. \subsection{}, and in Word I can 
select the "subsection" style in the toolbar; in both cases, this is 
semantic meaning, which then gets formatted according to the stylesheet 
or template being used. And, in either one, I can do semantically 
meaningless formatting, e.g. in LaTeX use {\large Subsection title} 
instead of using \subsection{Subsection title}, and similarly in Word.

The degree towards which you promote one or the other is completely 
orthogonal to WYSIWYG versus markup-based formatting, and depends on 
which primitives you provide and make easiest to use in the interface 
(where "interface" means either the markup language or the GUI, as the 
case may be).

-Mark