Griwes wrote:
And the first argument was WYSIWTF part.
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using WYSIWYG to write XML makes it WYSIWTF
WYSIWTF is not an argument. It's merely a pejorative. A real argument should convey some technical or practical reason against WYSIWYG. You seem to have provided a definition for WYSIWTF this time but it has nothing to do with WYSIWYG, which you originally used the pejorative for. So I still don't see what your argument was.
As you can see below, I disagree with the new definition as well.
Griwes wrote:
LaTeX is definitely not WYSIWYG (you see LaTeX source, you get a document - those were different, the last time I checked).
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(which is one of those WYSIWYG thingies - again, source generating something else is *not* WYSIWYG. You got me thinking you were talking real WYSIWYG before, eh)
WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) merely means that you prepare your presentation in a graphical environment which approximates the published version. It has absolutely nothing to do with encoding---LaTeX may very well be used as a back end, for example, and the same holds true for DocBook+stylesheets. In fact, most word processors today, including Microsoft Office and OpenOffice's Write, support of variety of XML-based formats. Would you argue that these are not WYSIWYG processors?
In principle, I have nothing against (La)TeX being used as a back-end. However, they are designed to be typesetting languages for people to write documents in. While with slow computers this was an advantage, today's computers used in conjunction with modern WYSIWYG processors makes this advantage go out the window. One can write DocBook documents by hand as well but, just as in (La)TeX' case, this is not a strength by any means. A good design today may not still be a good design tomorrow.
In my original response, while my first point was that this so-called strengh is not actually relevant, my second one was what I consider to be a major disadvantage.
Griwes wrote:
Of course it's not, but it's not really suitable for storing things like ODF
That's very different from your original claim that "they don't work with version control at all," don't you think? I will concede the point that, for versioning systems that use a delta-like concept, is easier to pinpoint differences between different generations of a textual file, since no special tool is required. But DocBook does fit the bill.