Why formatting matters

What You See Is What You Get: for a long time, this has been one of the most important acronyms in desktop publishing. If the authoring tool was not WYSIWYG, it was deemed hopelessly old-fashioned. Of course you wanted your editing environment to show an instant preview of what your content was going to look like on paper. How could anyone not want to have that instant preview?

Text by Jang F.M. Graat

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Why formatting matters

Well, with the growing importance of single-sourcing (publishing the same content in various output formats) and reuse (reusing bits and pieces from one document in another one), WYSIWYG has lost a lot of its glamour. And while structured authoring is taking up an increasingly central role in the world of technical documentation, it is the turn of the WYSIWYG tools to appear old-fashioned.

The new kid in town is called XML and pure XML editing environments can count on more public interest than their SGML or HTML ancestors ever had. But is pure XML really better than WYSIWYG? Why are leading XML tools including sneak previews of possible outputs? Is there another paradigm that combines the virtues of true XML with the comfort of WYSIWIG?

In the beginning was the word (and not much else)

Before the era of desktop publishing, when most people were using word editors running on DOS or ...