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Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] oXygen 9 beta with WYSIWYG-like editing supportfor DocBook
Michael(tm) Smith wrote: > But for better or worse there does seem to be market demand for > WYSIWYG DocBook editing, so it's hard for me to find fault with > the vendor of what is a very good structural editor for XML and > DocBook wanting to add WYSIWYG capabilities to try to respond to > that market need. And I can imagine a scenario of a representative > from oXygen going in to do a product demo of that editor and > having one of the first questions from the customer be, How do I > make things bold and italic? If Oxygen wishes to hire me as their demo rep, I would be more than happy to use such a question as a teaching moment to explain the importance of semantic markup. :-) In brief I would ask the questioner why they want to make a particular piece of text bold and then show them how to indicate that semantic in the tool. They'd get the answer but they'd learn a little something else too. If I just told them to "Click the little B button" they'd never have the opportunity to learn. > If somebody wants to argue that a UI should not include features/ > buttons for italic/emphasis or bold/strong-emphasis at all, then > that would seem to me to make a lot more sense. But emphasis in > DocBook amounts to meaning "markup for any content that you want > to be output in italic but which does not have any other semantics > associated with it", so it might just as well been called italic > to begin with. > No, it wouldn't. Emphasis is not synonymous with italics. Even granting your point that all emphasis might as well be italics, we still have the undisputed fact that many uses of italics (and some uses of bold) have nothing to do with emphasis: foreign words, equations, words used as words, etc. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published! http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/
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