Re: word processor document format: what parts?

[Christopher Curtis <ccurtis ee fit edu>]

On Sun, 20 Sep 1998, Olof Oberg wrote:

> Timothy Ritchey <tritchey@vne.com> wrote:
> [snip]
> > Computers are not doorknobs or lightswitches. They take training to
[...]
> 
> I agree fully. If we just gave the users a good manual with a lot 
> of examples I think they will do just fine. The obsticle of doing 

Nobody reads before they use.  First they use, then they do wrong, then
they read.  The primary method people learn is from making mistakes, not
studying the matter beforehand.  This applies to myself and nearly
everyone I've ever watched try anything.  If something is far too
confusing to understand at a precursory glance, the manual will be
consulted depending on the percieved value of said tool.  If you make the
WP so complex that you need to read the manual to start, people are just
going to use xedit and complain about it.

Frame (which I love and think should be used as a model, or DeScribe)
suffers the same problem.  The biggest problem, though, is that the
default style sheet is blank text.  This is not how people are going to
learn.  There should be a default set of style sheets, even for blank
paper, which contain paragraph flows and following paragraph tags.

When someone sits down to start typing on a "balnk sheet", the first line
should already be indented according to a deafult style sheet.  People
will find this confusing, but will take the time to figure out how or why,
especially if it is made easy to apply different styles to a whole
document with a single mouse click, and is obvious how to do so.  The
converse, which is to have no style, is easily remedied by hitting <tab> -
exactly what shouldn't happen.  If that doesn't work, most people will try
to figure out how to add a tab stop - also what isn't wanted.  The idea
should then be to pretend to be smarter than the user, and make the user
dumb-down the program, rather than assume that users are intelligent or
strive to learn.  Most people really do not want to learn a program.  They
simply want a means to accomplish an end in the most efficient way
possible, even if that way is the Wrong Way (tm).

The only thing really needed to amke this system work is a means to make
it obvious how to change these things.  For instance, I don't really think
that there should be an easy way to change a font, or point size, or
effect.  Instead, there should be an easy way to create, manage, and apply
styles, like Frame's Paragraph Designer, and Character Designer, but
better, and more enforced.

But I'm not working on this and don't really have the time to commit to
doing so, so I'm going to try to say no more about it.  I really don't
care about the underlying structure; it's irrelevant to the
implementation.  But as long as the design is made compatible, there
should be no issue with exporting/interacting/etc.  I only suggested CSS
before because Netscape and IE supports it, and it would be good to have a
seamless editor for HTML that is truly platform agnostic.  Ugh.  Too many
buzzwords.  I must conclude...

So I think it would be good if everything is a style and there is no
freeform (unclassified) text and it's easy to add styles to portions of
documents or entire documents and to create such styles for easy import
and export to web standards such as those implemented in the code already
existing in Mozilla, etc. etc.

Christopher