At 18:03 15/05/2014 +1000, Marina Tadiello wrote:
I'm simply asking that user perspective is taken into consideration at least as much as the programmer's own. The starting point ought always to be that computers are there to aid humans. And not all humans take to computing as well as programmers do. It's just obvious to me - why should it sound so "strange" to programmers? :-)
Come, come: this is entirely a straw man! No-one writing user software fails to take users and their humanity into account - and you do the very kind developers of OpenOffice (with whom, for the avoidance of doubt, I have no connection) a serious disservice by suggesting that they do. The styles you deplore are surely designed with users and their needs in mind, not with any convenience of programming. Your desire for the software to be user-friendly is of course spot on, but your conclusion that this end is provided by "reveal codes" is totally wrong.
It's interesting that you failed to reply to my earlier comments (not that you have any responsibility to do so, of course) and that you excised my comments from the message to which you did reply (though unhelpfully leaving my name in). What should we deduce from this: that my suggestions were so much to the point that you cannot fault them?!
Since you are still asking for a low-level approach to word processing on the pretext of wanting a high-level approach, it may be worth exercising the argument further. There are three possible reasons, I suggest, for wanting "reveal codes".
1. The first is that you actually want to be able to see *how* the program works - in other words, you are a geek and want to think like a programmer, not like a true user. There is nothing wrong with that: it's like the person who buys a new gadget and wants - before s/he uses it - to take it apart and see not how to use it but how it actually works. This person, when they look at a car with the prospect of buying it, does not sit in the driving seat and get the feel of the controls, but instead opens the bonnet and starts fiddling with the engine components. You claim not to be this person, but you nevertheless ask to see the innards of the program.
2. The second possibility is that you are dissatisfied with the way that OpenOffice (in particular, Writer) displays the structure (as distinct from the appearance) of any document. You perhaps inherit a document from elsewhere and need to know how to modify it as you need. For that, you need to be able to see its structure. I have to say that I cannot disagree with such a suggestion! In case anyone doesn't know what I mean, let me give a simple example. Suppose you have two similar-looking tables with one immediately following the other - with no intervening element, that is. There is no easy way to see immediately that you have two tables and not just one, longer table. But the two cases behave differently, and you need to know which you have in order to be able to handle the document efficiently. (Yes, there are ways to see which you have, but they are indirect and not very obvious.) The solution to this, though, is to improve the display of document structure, not to ask to look inside the program. If you need to know when your car is low on fuel, you ask for a fuel gauge on the dashboard, not an external dipstick on the fuel tank.
3. When you revealed codes in Word Perfect, you could, I think, tinker with them: you could edit the codes directly, deleting one here and entering a new one there. Indeed, I think that was their purpose: Word Perfect would sometime get itself in a twist and end up with inconsistent tags in a document - and the solution offered by its developers was to show the user the internal workings of the program and insist that they tinkered with them to achieve what was necessary. In this way, they were insisting that users (temporarily?) became programmers, not (as you seem to think) the other way about. But as soon as you allow users to *modify* any such tags, you immediately lose the integrity of the tags: it's just as easy to delete one tag of a pair and leave the other or to add an unbalanced tag or to insert a misspelled one as to do something meaningful. Word Perfect offered a facility for you to sort out its mistakes, but what you are asking for is a recipe for users' creating confused and incorrect documents.
It's perhaps also worth saying that the idea of "reveal codes" implies the existence of such codes in the first place. In other words, you are assuming that the internal model of the program labels the structure through tags - as a mark-up language does. But this is only one way for programs and documents to behave - and many don't.
Do you know the best way? My ideal word processor would not be at all wysiwyg; instead it would concentrate on displaying plain text with all the structure of the document. You would not see the appearance of the document until the last minute, when you used Page Preview. But that would be no problem since, with such clear indication of the structure of the document, you would know before you saw it that the document would appear exactly as you wanted! (Er, but I'm not expecting anyone to believe this for a decade or three!)
I hope that your true concern is my second possibility and that you can campaign on its behalf.
Brian Barker
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