An interview with Donald Knuth

shem gave us the hook-up to a review with Donald Knuth ^[?] . He talks about retiring early from teaching to work on his writing, as well as his on-going project of writing The Art of Computer Programming

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WYSIWYG vs Markup

[Sloppy]

On the downside, TeX is limited in its appeal because it's not WYSIWYG, Fuchs admits, employing the acronym for "what you see is what you get" the standard term describing text processing software that displays formatting on screen as it will appear on the printed page.

This seems a good a time as any to get this off my chest: Not only do I consider WYSIWYG to not be an important feature, but I think it has caused a lot of harm.

Maybe it's just because I grew up using text formatters like "runoff", but one of the things I liked about markup-based formatting was that I always knew that the document would always come out right, even efter I made changes. When I first encountered a word processor (WordPerfect) in the late 80s, even though it wasn't really WYSIWYG, it tried to be, and it infuriated me that whenever I added a paragraph to a document, I always had to scroll down and "fix" all the formatting problems that it might cause further down the document. Eventually I discovered that when I used WordPerfect's "reveal codes" mode, it was about as good as a traditional text formatter.

And things haven't changed since then. Now the people in the office are using MS Word, and I swear: they spend just as much time manually formatting documents as they spend typing text. It's ridiculous! WYSIWYG makes the user do formatting work that should be done by the computer.

And then there are the web "masters" (*cough*) who use WYSIWYG HTML-authoring tools. This trains them to think that WYSIWYG is even possible on the web, and they make web pages that look all screwed up if you don't have you window the exact same size as theirs, for example.

WYSIWYG sucks! Markup forever! Long live runoff, nroff, troff, TeX, HTML, etc!

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Have a Sloppy day!