4 Jun
2024
4 Jun
'24
7:22 p.m.
The history of markup and WSYWYG (or, as a friend said, WYSIAYG - what you
see is all you get) is fascinating.
The early markup systems (runoff and its derivatives like troff, nroff,
IBM's SCRIPT) focused on manipulation of representation. Normal, bold,
italic, font size, justification and centering, and so on, were the
vocabulary of the old systems. These systems, to me, were assembler
language for contemporary phototypesetters.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s we began to get systems that, as Douglas
noted, could express the logical structure of documents. GML and SCRIBE
were my first exposures to this way of thinking and they made life much
much better for the writer.
The standards work that created SGML went a bit overboard, to my taste.
The only really serious adopters of SGML that I can think of were the US
military, but there may have been others.
Along the way were some fascinating attempts at clever hybrids. Mike
Cowlishaw built a markup system for the Oxford University Press back in the
early 1980s on secondment from IBM. It had a rather elegant ability to
switch between markup mode and rendering mode so you could peek at how
something would look. I know that it was used by OUP for the humongous
task of converting the OED from its old paper-based production framework to
the electronic system that they use today, though I have no idea what the
current details are.
The hybrid model is not dead, by the way. The wikimedia system adopts it
... you may edit either in markup mode or in WSYWYG mode, though I find the
WSYWYG mode to be frustrating. Sadly, the markdown stuff used by wikimedia
is pretty annoying to work with and the rendering is buggy and sometimes
incomprehensible (to me, at least).
Making a strong system that includes inline markup editing AND
WSYWYG editing with clean flipping between them would be fascinating.
Sadly, the markup specifications are flimsy and the ease of creating crazy
markup like <h1><b>blah blah</i></h2> in edit mode makes for some
difficult
exception handling problems.
Marc
=====
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On Sun, Jun 2, 2024 at 8:40 AM Douglas McIlroy <
douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
Were you
surprised when folks settled on word processors in favor of
markup?
I'm not sure what you're asking. "Word processor" was a term coming
into
prominence when Unix was in its infancy. Unix itself was sold to management
partly on the promise of using it to make a word processor. All word
processors used typewriters and were markup-based. Screens, which
eventually enabled WYSIWYG, were not affordable for widespread use.
Perhaps the question you meant to ask was whether we were surprised when
WYSIWYG took over word-processing for the masses. No, we weren't, but we
weren't attracted to it either, because it sacrificed markup's potential
for expressing the logical structure of documents and thus fostering
portability of text among distinct physical forms, e.g. man pages on
terminals and in book form or technical papers as TMs and as journal
articles. WYSIWYG was also unsuitable for typesetting math. (Microsoft Word
clumsily diverts to a separate markup pane for math.)
Moreover, WYSIWYG was out of sympathy with Unix philosophy, as it kept
documents in a form difficult for other tools to process for unanticipated
purposes, In this regard, I still regret that Luca Cardelli and Mark
Manasse moved on from Bell Labs before they finished their dream of Blue, a
WYSIWYG editor for markup documents, I don't know yet whether that blue-sky
goal is achievable. (.docx may be seen as a ponderous latter-day attempt.
Does anyone know whether it has fostered tool use?)
Doug