Looking Out To Sea

I admit to being one of that set of users who prefer text-based email to HTML. This preference also shows in how I write my blog posts (in a text editor) and how I write letters for print (again, in a text editor).

The revolution will not be badly formatted

I can’t be sure what it is I prefer about the raw text. One facet of it is the sheer bloody-minded inadequacy of WYSIWYG tools. They are so prone to making deep, ugly nests of mutually exclusive formatting. With HTML editors this stuff is obvious:

<font size="2">A font size can be
  <font size="3">enlarged and then
    <font size="2">made smaller</font>
  </font>in really inadequate ways.
</font>

but that doesn’t mean it’s not obviously the cause of so many silly problems people have with word processors. “Why does it change font when I press return?!” or “Why is it writing in italics?” and so on.

I know that if I don’t ask for italics, or anything else, I won’t get them. This is quite satisfying. There will never be bits of invisible formatting floating across the page, waiting to ensnare my text like Spectres from a demon dimension. I can see everything.

Leave me alone with my art, dahlings

There’s also something untainted about writing without style or formatting. The literal placement of marks on a page, without thought to how they might look, is quite liberating. There’s a certain appeal to that, I can’t deny.

It also comes in really handy if I have to write code or similar. I would go to horrendous lengths to make sure smart quotes and ellipses and proportional-width fonts were all turned off. I read some programming mailing lists and the occasional HTML message really throws a spanner in the works.

Maybe one of these days we’ll have advanced enough user interfaces that can cope with all of these demands — slick styling, exact control and ease of use. But I’ve never met a good one yet.