From: xexeo@dxcern.cern.ch (Geraldo Xexeo)
Subject: Re: What You See Is All You Get
Organization: CERN European Lab for Particle Physics
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1992 14:20:25 GMT

In article <715760627snx@sgmlinc.com>, brian@sgmlinc.com (Brian E. Travis) writes:
 
> Let's face it, WYSIWYG is just another hype word that should be 
> categorized with "powerful", "easy-to-use", and "Version 2.0"
> Brian.

Wrong. WYSIWYG is currently a *goal*  a lot of people are really
working for. Although one can expect WYSIWYG to become *reality* just when
we have display at 300-1200 dpi, I think this is short-thinking. Actually,
nowadays a lot of programs offer *better* graphics than a standard Postscript
printer. Just face the problems of colors or printing photos.

WYSIWYG is sometimes bad applied. WYSIWYG is a shortcoming, because users
want more in the video than in the paper. WYSIWYG can make bells and whistles
 more important to some users than the *real* stuff. But we want to
see in the video HOW things are going to be printed, we want to see it
most of the time, and we want this to be *FAST*.

MOst urrent systems that claim to be WYSIWYG actually are "What you see is almost what you get". But get NeXT and DisplayPostcript. 
There you can garantee that, but for dpis and errors in Postscript software, 
you have WYSIWYG.

Of course, if you are developing programs you *DON'T NEED* WYSISYG to edit
your program. But your programs would be much better if instead of a 
command or menu interface to fill forms it provides a real WYSIWYG form
exactly like the one you are going to print. Of course, you can solve that 
printing ugly ascii forms at 100 dpi exactly like your video :-). 


Programs should be easy-to-use,  WYSIWYG, user-friendly. These are not hype
 words, these are measures of quality of software, 
hese are characteristics that can designed (or not) in our
system. These are items subject to research. I suggest you to read any book
on Computer Human Interaction to get more information on the subject.


Not believing in WYSIWYG, using WIMP to denominate a Mac-like interface,
and other similar acts, is (bad) conservative thinking based on
lack of understanding of the advantages of these system over other
(simpler) types of systems. A programmer shoud always remember that
programs should interact whith humans, and, among these,
not all users are hackers, not all users fell well in front of a computer
and, in contrary, most of the users think computers are very similar to
black-magic. But there will be no "information society" without this users
we are so likely to despise.


     Flaming for the sake of software engineering,

                    Jerry

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