Re: enriched-mode and switching major modes.

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> It is basically as you said: you express your intents.  But rather
> than doing this via a command or markup language, you do it by
> interacting with a UI.

It's a false dichotomy: Emacs on a tty is a UI.
I guess what you mean to say here is that rather than representing the
intent as text you'd represent it somehow graphically.

Of course this graphical representation depends on the rendering device, so
the user can't know the intent unless he remembers how it's represented
graphically on this particular device.
That might be OK, of course, if the mapping is obvious enough from context.

> This abstracts your intent from a specific file format ("deep
> representation").

So you don't actually get to see the abstract representation, even though
that's really what you're editing.  I.e. you're still editing somewhat
blind-folded.

You're trying to strike a balance between WYSIWYG and plain text.

> The benefit is that you do this while looking at the "surface
> expression".

With something like WhyzzyTeX I get to edit while seeing (rather than
"looking at") the surface expression.


        Stefan