From: mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (J. D. McDonald)
Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.misc
Subject: Re: ARGHH!-WFW2.0 Sucks big time!
Keywords: Crashes problems wfw
Date: 13 Oct 92 20:43:51 GMT
Article-I.D.: aries.mcdonald.392
Organization: UIUC SCS

In article <1992Oct13.052247.6046@random.ccs.northeastern.edu> alansar@ccs.northeastern.edu (Mohammad Al-Ansari) writes:

>In article <mcdonald.368@aries.scs.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (J. D. McDonald) writes:


>>************************************************************************
>>
>>W4W is like a 
>>programming language would be if the code was "write and delete only" and
>>you could only tell if it was right  by examining the output .. 
>>no debuggers!!!  (I.e. once you wrote the code, you could never examine
>>it exactly ... only delete lines of the source without seeing them, 
>>only knowing what you intended them to do (e.g. seeing the comments).
>>
>>************************************************************************

>No. You don't write ANY code in WFW. You only give a description of the output
>by using some visual tools.  The "programming" you are talking about is done
>for you by WFW.  The goal of anybody who uses a word processor is to have
>output that matches his or her specifications. 

Sure, we agree that that is the goal.


>WFW does exactly that and thus
>you should not complain about not being able to see the code.
No, it does **NOT** do that. It **TRIES** to do it, but it makes,
occasionally, mistakes.


>It is just
>another way of doing things.  I certainly don't want to know what goes on
>behind the seens if I don't need to. Unless there is something I don't know,
>and depending on how you answer the question above, I couldn't care less about
>the code that WFW stores. I only care about the output.



>WFW is an interface between you and the code.  Do you object to all such
>graphical interfaces? You also should direct this criticism to all WYSIWYG
>word processors on all platforms, not only WFW.

What I object to is not being able to see the code. You can put stuff, 
even in the absence of bug in the actual W4W program code, in your
document that you can't understand .. that is, you get a visual effect
but you don't know what in the  code that W4W generated is causing the 
effect ... and there are some effects that can be generated by many
different methods. IF you don't know how an effect is generated, you
simply can't undo it, whether you just decide to change a document, or 
perhaps you accidentally hit an unknown key shortcut and thus did
something accidentally. This latter is the **BIG** problem. 

For example, just an hour ago, I pasted a character into a document
from the clipboard (cut out of another document) and the whole 
formatting of my page collapsed in a heap. I was never able to get it fixed,
and just had to go into a backup and start over. It probably carried 
over along with that single character some whole slew of "hidden"
formatting codes that I could not see or figure out.

My point is that a "reveal codes" option would allow me to see **WHY**
my document looks the way it does, so I can rationally fix errors in it.

I see no objection to the **IDEA** of inputting codes the W4W WYSIWYG
way. It a brilliant idea. But since there is no **absolute** one-to-one
correspondence between what is seen on the page, and what method W4W
is using to get that appearance (i.e. what you typed in, on purpose or
accidentally, or what W4W generated by a bug in itself) you still 
sometimes need to see the actual real codes.

Is that clear?  It's very hard to explain it better.


Doug McDonald


>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Mohammad Al-Ansari                      | alansar@damon.ccs.northeastern.edu
>College of Computer Science             | alansar@gnu.ai.mit.edu
>Northeastern University                 | BITNET: alansar@NUHUB
Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.misc