Quoting Dan Armak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:

> OK, so put hierarchical structures aside. If someone has two kinds of headers
> in his document, big and small ones, surely they can generalize to the point
> of telling the editor "this is a big header" instead of telling it "this is a
> 16pt. bold font"? They'd just see it as another miracle tool...
> 
> Or have I lost touch with reality?

Yep. Well, you know what I mean. Think about it - humans did not always deal
with the magical world of virtuality. You have a herd of cows. You milk the
first one. Of course your intuition recognizes that Edna, Bossie, Hemda etc. are
all objects of class Cow. But in real life, that merely means that you have to
do with Bossie the same that you did with Edna. It's not enough to milk the
first cow, and then say "Now let's call this operation "milking", and apply it
to all the cows". You actually have to sit down, and plug them one by one to the
milking machine.

So, to most people, having a "smaller header like the one I already did in page
one", means remembering what your operations were at the time, and repeating
them. So yes, it's Arial, Bold, 16pts every single time. Or if they are smarter,
they use that "style copy and paste" magic tool.

I think this issue goes well beyond the subject of word processors. It bears on
the whole Linux-on-desktop issue. As programmers, we make lousy design decisions
for "consumer products". Bad interfaces, features which are not understandable
to the user. We keep forgetting that the user wants to do what he's good at, not
what *we* are good at. This is why we have such excellent server programs as
Apache, Samba etc. etc., but the desktops look like bad Windows look-alikes, and
the applications are worse.

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]

Reply via email to