On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 05:23:53PM +0100, John Levon wrote: > On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 06:46:45PM +0300, Martin Vermeer wrote: > > > Not very convincing, is it? Most people learn from experience. What > > would happen here is that they would quickly pick up that -- no, this > > stuff does not behave like italicize; it behaves like insets instead. > > Familiar paradigm that too, though different. After that realization, > > everything becomes natural, and the above mistakes silly in retrospect. > > And soon the penny will drop on the many advantages. > > Could you list the advantages of an exposed inset UI? > > thanks > john
Adding to my earlier comment (and referring to advantage 1) let me note that I have had opportunity to compare both UI paradigms as a user, for the case of branches. Branches are not charstyles, of course. But when I started out implementing branches, I came first up with a prototype based on character attributes -- i.e., ranges --, essentially cloning the colour attribute. Even before that, I had opportunity to use colour as a surrogate for charstyle, essentially the method described by Steve Litt. I wrote a number of nontrivial bilingual documents with it, lecture notes, exam questions etc. The char attribute prototype was not accepted. Especially Angus forced me to re-do it as insets, with a proper dialogue and background colours. The result was the branches implementation that we have now. Also with this UI I have created, and bi- and multi-linguified, substantial documents. How do they compare? Well, the docs created according to the first paradigm are initially full of errors, mostly related to spaces: spaces which shouldn't be there, lacking spaces, double spaces (when there is text inbetween in a branch that is not being output). Correcting these errors is quite tricky (because with blanks, you don't get feedback from the display.) Documents created according to the second (inset) paradigm contain much fewer errors of this kind, and they are easier to correct. I think this is a real-life comparative experience -- subjective of course -- with both alternative paradigms. Of course sensitivity to user error as such is not decisive, but here I think it is a symptom of a less-than-ideal UI. The char range UI would be better if blanks were visible, e.g., as dots, like they can be made in Word. Although a small dot isn't very good at disclosing its rendering style either. - Martin
