Re: facemenu-unlisted-faces

[Sascha Wilde]

"Drew Adams" <address@hidden> wrote:

I haven't read the whole thread, so please forgive me if what I'm
going to write is redundant...

[...]
> FWIW - I never argued that anything should be bulletproof or that anything
> shouldn't be changeable. My argument was that applying a text property (such
> as boldness) to text is conceptually simpler and closer to what newbies are
> used to than is applying a face to text. That's all.

I think I'm getting your point and I think you are right, that that's
the way many (most?) people do WYSIWYG text formatting these days.
But I also think, that this is the wrong way to do it, and that we
shouldn't encourage it in any way.

Edited text should be marked up semantically, not by means of concrete
visual properties.

This is especially important with electronic text, where you will
never know about the special properties of the medium the recipient
will use when he reads it:  He might use an X-Terminal (with high
resolution, colors, arbitrary fonts), a Text terminal (which might
only know about bold and one font), a printout, or he might be even
blind, using a speech synthesizer...

Users should rather learn to use a semantically named face like
"subtitle" or "emphasized" from the very start than to mark text as
"bold" or "italic".

These concepts ain't new, they are well known for a long time, but I
think it's a big obstacle, that most existing text processing systems
(let them be WYSIWYG "office" programs or markup languages like HTML)
make it too easy for the user to ignore them.

just my 2¢
sascha
-- 
Sascha Wilde
We're Germans and we use Unix. That's a combination of two 
demographic groups known to have no sense of humour whatsoever.
  -- Hanno Mueller in de.comp.os.unix.programming