I picked up an allergy for WYSIWYG while reading through the works of Engelbart. It's not flexible enough and locks you down to a way of think which does not properly leverage the advantages of our new medium; related:
>Our approach was very different from what they called "office automation," which was about automating the paperwork of secretaries. That became the focus of Xerox PARC in the '70s. They were quite amazed that they could actually get text on the screen to appear the way it would when printed by a laser printer. Sure, that was an enormous accomplishment, and understandably it swayed their thinking. They called it "what you see is what you get" editing, or WYSIWYG. I say, yeah, but that's all you get. Once people have experienced the more flexible manipulation of text that NLS allows, they find the paper model restrictive.
We weren't interested in "automation" but in "augmentation." We were not just building a tool, we were designing an entire system for working with knowledge
> Question: Isn't it great the we now have WYSIWYG technology so what you see is what yo get. You can print it out, you have wonderful, good looking documents with all kinds of typefaces?
Answer: That really is nice for the people who want to stay where they like used to be... That ignoring hugely all the other options you have...
If one is capable of holding the entire conceptual abstract ephemera relating to the concrete problem you are solving, then WYSIWYG is mentally jarring as it often takes away from proper semantic representations of concepts. Indeed very often WYSIWYG attempts to hide semantic meaning from users in an attempt to make it seem easier. Of course for the simpler case this is true. But for complex cases where structure and uniformity and restructuring are important use cases then WYSIWYG is destructive compared with a much simpler markup.
I'd also argue with little evidence that there is something mentally jarring for the competent about self expression when having to await moving your arm to do something with a mouse in the midst of the flow of editing.
>Our approach was very different from what they called "office automation," which was about automating the paperwork of secretaries. That became the focus of Xerox PARC in the '70s. They were quite amazed that they could actually get text on the screen to appear the way it would when printed by a laser printer. Sure, that was an enormous accomplishment, and understandably it swayed their thinking. They called it "what you see is what you get" editing, or WYSIWYG. I say, yeah, but that's all you get. Once people have experienced the more flexible manipulation of text that NLS allows, they find the paper model restrictive.
We weren't interested in "automation" but in "augmentation." We were not just building a tool, we were designing an entire system for working with knowledge
- Douglas Engelbart; http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/mouse_pr.html
> Question: Isn't it great the we now have WYSIWYG technology so what you see is what yo get. You can print it out, you have wonderful, good looking documents with all kinds of typefaces?
Answer: That really is nice for the people who want to stay where they like used to be... That ignoring hugely all the other options you have...
http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/engelbart/glossary/wysiwy...