Hi,

At 01:49 PM 2/11/2010, John Young wrote:
>It seems to me that what the oXygen people should do is make it a 
>bit more obvious how to stipulate your preferred default. Both views 
>have their uses but surely it's up to the user to decide which suits 
>him or her best. Also, if you make *any* changes to a document in 
>Author view, it bungs in a load of 'prettyPrint' formatting that 
>merely makes everyone's life more difficult. At least, that's my 
>bitter experience.

I think this thread is really interesting since it exposes some 
important differences between expectations and reality.

Personally I haven't found it as problematic as some that oXygen 
defaults to one view or the other, when working with any type of 
document (TEI or otherwise); but I am probably the outlier. I work 
with so many different sorts of documents in so many modes, I am just 
used to switching; at worst I find it a minor inconvenience.

John's point about how an editing tool, in pretty-display (in 
oXygen's case, "Author" mode), messes up the formatting of the 
source, is a common experience -- indeed, so common, I think, that it 
suggests there's no right way to do it. One person's right way to do 
it, or at least tolerable approach, is someone else's bunging in a 
load. But a tool that layers its own prettified view on top -- whose 
entire raison d'etre is to do so -- has got to do something. (And I 
know the oXygen team continues to work on this one.)

Certainly the consensus view on this list says something. It may be 
that contrary to expectations, TEI users work in ways and doing tasks 
for which Author mode itself is less suitable than one might have 
supposed. (This seems to be the gist of Prof Mueller's remarks.)

I wonder if the strength of Author mode is in writing new texts -- 
something I personally do with it quite a bit -- and not in creating 
or working with encoded versions of texts already extant, in which 
the work of encoding itself, not composition, is front and center.

Another point of potential stress is in the design of the CSS. If the 
CSS is weak, there's no way the Author mode can work well. But the 
display requirements for TEI are so complex and variable that it 
seems quite unlikely there'd be no single CSS that would be adequate 
for everyone. This means that individual projects may need to 
custom-fit their CSS to their tag usage before Author mode becomes 
very useful to them.

Cheers,
Wendell



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Wendell Piez                            mailto:[log in to unmask]
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