From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!npois!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Newsgroups: fa.editor-p Title: what you see is what you get Article-I.D.: ucb.1658 Posted: Sat Jul 31 04:13:01 1982 Received: Sun Aug 1 01:23:37 1982 >From decvax!utzoo!henry@Berkeley Sat Jul 31 04:05:21 1982 "What you see is what you get" sounds like a fine idea, until one starts to ask questions like: "...what you get" on *what device*??? Combining WYSIWYG with formatting specifications that are sufficiently high-level and device-independent that the text will look ok when moved to a different device with different characteristics is very, very hard. WYSIWYG formatters tend to present a very low-level view of text, with change primitives being along the lines of "add a blank line here"; it is quite difficult to abstract from this to a higher-level specification of what the text is supposed to look like. In fact, I'm not sure it is practical to combine WYSIWYG with high-level specifications, at least not with any civilized user interface. WYSIWYG inherently tends to focus people's attention on fiddling with the final output rather than changing the basic specifications of the text. Henry Spencer decvax!utzoo!henry