2 Jun
2024
2 Jun
'24
9:21 p.m.
On 2 Jun 2024 08:39 -0400, from douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu (Douglas McIlroy):
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?)
Does Markdown count?
Especially when combined with LaTeX support for typesetting math, it's
probably quite good enough for most peoples' needs outside of niche
applications; and there are WYSIWYG editors (not just text editors
with a preview, but actual WYSIWYG editors) which use Markdown as the
storage format.
Of course, what Markdown very specifically does _not_ even try to do
is provide any strong presentation guarantees. In that sense, it's
quite a lot like early HTML. (And that, naturally, results in people
doing things like using different heading levels not to represent the
document outline, but rather because the result renders as what they
feel is an "appropriate" text size at that point in the document.)
--
Michael Kjörling 🔗 https://michael.kjorling.se
“Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”