>With inline LaTeX previews, we're already surprisingly close. In fact, I'd say that going all the way would be almost a step back. WYSIWYG is ultimately not an ideal editing paradigm: it wins in the short term, being easy to learn, but drags you down in the long term.
That --in the extend that it happens-- is a byproduct of the limitations of current WYSIWYG editors, not something inherent in the idea of WYSIWYG editing.
It's not like we had a lot of brainstorming and innovating solutions competing in this area (in fact, there are only 3, all too similar, major products: Word, Pages and Open Office, of which one has 90% of the users).
Second, what's "inconvenient" and "distracting" for one user, is a must and an inspiration for another.
Not to mention there are several different use cases for WYSIWYG editing, and LaTeX style editing doesn't cover them all. For example it's dreadful for quick experimentation with placement and formatting of small, disparate elements (basically, anything not according to the "spec").
>I've recently started using Quora a bit more. Unlike StackOverflow, they use a WYSIWYG editor. I've found this significantly less convenient than StackOverflow's markdown.
WYSIWYG's strong point is not small website comments.
> That --in the extend that it happens-- is a byproduct of the limitations of current WYSIWYG editors, not something inherent in the idea of WYSIWYG editing.
If WYSIWYG editing is not inherently limited, why do pretty much no editors actually support it? For example, spelling/grammar checkers are useful, but when pseudo-WYSIWYG editors implement them, they underline the text, or change its colour. This colouring and formatting doesn't appear when the document is printed.
Hyperlinks are usually hit and miss; sometimes they print as 'blue and underline' (but, of course, are useless), sometimes they don't.
Annotations don't print, but they do show on the screen. Automatically-generated content like page numbers are often shown differently, eg. with a grey background. Again, this doesn't appear when printed.
In short, what you see is certainly not what you get; but removing these non-WYSIWYG features would be a step backwards.
>If WYSIWYG editing is not inherently limited, why do pretty much no editors actually support it? For example, spelling/grammar checkers are useful, but when pseudo-WYSIWYG editors implement them, they underline the text, or change its colour. This colouring and formatting doesn't appear when the document is printed.
That's just an extra convinience feature you can turn on or off, and doesn't have anything to do with whether the editor is WYSIWYG or not.
It's not like the program forces you to see red swiggly lines underneath words when editing...
>Hyperlinks are usually hit and miss; sometimes they print as 'blue and underline' (but, of course, are useless), sometimes they don't.
Which is configurable too in all editors I know of. And the "blue and underline" is not exactly useless -- it conveys the information that this part of the document was a hyperlink initially.
>In short, what you see is certainly not what you get
No, it's 99.9% of what you get, minus additional layers of information that people expect to be there, and you can turn on or off.
I have found WYSIWYM concept (What You See Is What You Mean) and WymEditor[1] in particular a very useful solution, at least for website editing.
Previously I have used Xinha, FSCKEditor and similar, but there was always some problem with the resulting markup. WymEditor copes much better in this regard... (not affiliated, just really like the concept and WymEditor)
> It's not like we had a lot of brainstorming and innovating solutions competing in this area (in fact, there are only 3, all too similar, major products: Word, Pages and Open Office, of which one has 90% of the users).
We also had PageMaker, FrameMaker, Word Perfect, Ami Pro.
That --in the extend that it happens-- is a byproduct of the limitations of current WYSIWYG editors, not something inherent in the idea of WYSIWYG editing.
It's not like we had a lot of brainstorming and innovating solutions competing in this area (in fact, there are only 3, all too similar, major products: Word, Pages and Open Office, of which one has 90% of the users).
Second, what's "inconvenient" and "distracting" for one user, is a must and an inspiration for another.
Not to mention there are several different use cases for WYSIWYG editing, and LaTeX style editing doesn't cover them all. For example it's dreadful for quick experimentation with placement and formatting of small, disparate elements (basically, anything not according to the "spec").
>I've recently started using Quora a bit more. Unlike StackOverflow, they use a WYSIWYG editor. I've found this significantly less convenient than StackOverflow's markdown.
WYSIWYG's strong point is not small website comments.