2 Jun
2024
2 Jun
'24
8:48 p.m.
On 2024-06-02 08:39, Douglas McIlroy wrote (in part):
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.)
I liken suffering through WYSIWYG for math to searching through drawers
of movable type pieces for the desired piece.
Some time ago, I read a nice article titled "What you see is all you
get" but I cannot find the link (and Google fails me miserably). Found
this, though: What has WSYIWYG done for us:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050207015413/http://www.ideography.co.uk/libr…
S.