[Foundation-l] Can anyone really edit Wikipedia?

[Thomas Dalton]

2008/9/27 Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>:
> 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).

That's true, but when people use LaTeX they always do it properly with
all the semantic information included, when people use Word they
rarely do. WYSIWYG doesn't stop you doing things properly, but it does
make it easier not to.