Re: enriched-mode and switching major modes.

[Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de>]

Stefan <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> [ Note; I'm pretty happy with Emacs's current word-processing facilities
>   right now and don't see any need for it to develop into yet-another
>   WYSIWYG thingy
[...]

I don't talk about WYSIWYG.  I abhor the very concept of it in the
context of word processing.  "WYSIWYG" means to say something about
the relationship between the rendering of the document on screen and
on printed paper.

We can't have that in Emacs.  It would mean that if Emacs is started
on, say the linux tty, we would have to print the document in light
gray on black in a font which looks like the linux console font.  It
would mean that the printed output would look different when I start
Emacs on a character console, a terminal emulator or on the GUI.

Traditional word processors are conceptually ambigous here.  WYSIWYG
makes sense only for DTP, where you specify the exact position of text
on the paper.

I believe that "WYSIWYG" is a relic of the times when "ordinary
people" did not trust computers and tried to look at them as a special
kind of typewriter.  Nowadays there are other buzzwords to make up for
the initial confusion: "paperless office", "e-document exchange" and
the like.

[...]
> the deep representation (which, AFAIC, is not "just the disk format"
> but is the format where I can expresss my *intents*, i.e. where I
> can distinguish between two concepts even if they happen to be
> rendered identically on the currently used output mode)
[...]

Yes, that's a different editing model.  Just as I said to Robert
Chassel: some people would prefer an editing model, where the "deep
representation" is more than just the encoding of the abstract
document as frozen on disc.

    Oliver
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