Quoting Shachar Shemesh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Now you, standing on the cathedral of the one who has already aquired > them, say "but it's so easy! I'm so much more productive this way". To > quote Zaphod's special brain care analist, "That is true, but mostly > unimportant". Most people either don't want to go through the learning > process, or don't have the time and the patience. Bear in mind that not > even all the people who want to program manage to go through the process > of learning it. It's more than that. Most people, unlike programmers, don't think in a symbolic+logic way. Most don't try to find the most efficient way to perform a task, but just *some* way to perform it, preferably a familiar one. Our training has made us think in a different way than the majority of people. Thus, when writing a document, people don't think in the terms of a "level 3 heading", but rather in a more intuitive way of "now I want a smaller header so that people see it's not a new section but part of the old". If you told them their document was hierarchical they would ask you why you are cursing them. To them it's just big header - text - smaller header - text - another big header - text. And styles - the idea of grouping together a bunch of characteristics and giving them a name so you can use them later is trivial to you and me, because we've been spending years (nearly 20 years in my case) doing that in programs. To the average mother, it has no meaning and certainly is counter intuitive and requires forethought. To her, the ugly tool in MSWord that "gets the style from one place and puts it in another place" is the miracle tool, because it represents exactly what she wants. The fact is that this is a bad practice, because it doesn't maintain the connection between the two places for later on, so she'll have to repeat that again and again every time that she changes the style of the first paragraph. Go tell that to her. Heck, most people *can't* be programmers, and can't think in the symbol+logic format. My sister took a webmaster course. She was, and still is, a complete blockhead as far as Javascript is concerned, and I had a hard time even teaching her CSS. And believe me, she is an intelligent and wise woman, to whom I turn many times for advice. However, she can't grasp the decimal system (or, for that matter, any number base system) - all those things with remainders, divisions, and the connection between them and numbers, are just beyond her. Most people have a visual way of thinking, not a symbolic one. I guess that's why people believe that a plant root that *looks* like a human, has magical qualities. And that a root that *looks* like a you-know-what is an aphrodisiac. On another issue that was mentioned in this thread: So what if LaTeX formats things like a book should look? Not everybody writes books, and even books differ - a novel doesn't have the same format as a technical book. A book is different than an article, a news article is different than an academic article, and all of them are different than a fax or a recipe or an exam form or a text page a teacher gives to the pupils. Those four last things are what my mother uses her Word for - and they certainly shouldn't be arranged like a book. Herouth ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
