R.I.P. WYSIWYG Hello CrapIWYG
Jakob Nielsen (with whom I often agree) has recently come out proclaiming the end of WYSIWYG and the beginning of a new era: WYGIWYG, or “what you get is what you get”. All of a sudden it looks like my recent complaints about Visual Studio.NET will come to Word and the rest of the office suite. Now it will tell you what your documents should look like, don’t worry about the details.
As someone who wrote his dissertation in LaTeX, I find this a truly horrifying thought. A carefully laid out page is a thing of beauty. Now all documents are going to have the same “sameness” that all presentations already have. I wonder how long until people start modifying their language to match the design of the document that Word 12 (or whatever) tells you it should look like?
OTOH, this could be an effective way of separating the content from the display, which was always the goal of html. Then people could spend their time improving the content and add the formatting as an after thought. That would be nice. Give VS.NET and PowerPoint, I’ll believe it when I see it.
November 2nd, 2005 at 14:09
I guess I don’t see the difference between the “new” “what you get is what you see”
and the option to go through the Template Wizard when you open
a new document.
November 3rd, 2005 at 10:22
I read through the description on Microsoft’s web page–the one linked to by Nielsen–and it doesn’t seem to be as bad as you describe it. It looks like the menus have been replaced by a bunch of tabs, and each tab is commands that are relevant to what the user is doing now. This should make it easy for users to find commands. I find it hard to tell what it will really feel like, but it’s not obviously bad.
As best I can tell, they are combining something like templates with all of the specific formatting options of the past. This might be reasonable.
November 5th, 2005 at 11:15
I admit my reaction is more based on a fear of what might be based on past experience rather than knowledge of what is going to be. I suppose as long as it isn’t automatically trying to figure out what the correct formatting is for you, it could be ok. If it really is just specialized templates that would be fine, but I remember front page.