Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

software considered anthropomorphic

I stumbled across a flaming rant [via von Fintel's blog] "Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient" by Allin Cottrell. His thesis is explicitedly stated as "[t]he word processor is a stupid and grossly inefficient tool for preparing text for communication with others." I agree with Cottrell that it's better to separate the content from it's form (via some sort of markup), but this can be handled, as he admits late in the essay, by using styles (such as FrameMaker's paragraph and character catalogs) rather than ad hoc formatting of a document, but I think it's a fundamentally flawed argument. It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools, or, better yet, one can write bad FORTRAN programs in any language. What it really boils down to is a rant against Microsoft Word, which I agree is a piss-poor piece of software to either use or hold up as a standard. In a way, this reminds me of how first-year film students (in the days of celluloid) used to complain about the equipment they were forced to use and its non-state-of-the-art-ness. I always used to advise them to shoot a film like Potemkin, which had been produced with a hand-cranked camera, edited with scissors, and then to get back to me. Writing on yellow legal pads, using Emacs, vi, or FrameMaker, shouldn't really have that much of an impact on the content of your text, unless like some, you think that our tools affect our thoughts, warping us. Some, like Jakob Nielsen, warn us not to use PDF files in place of good old HTML. I am not convinced. I find it hard, both physically and aesthetically, to read lengthy texts in HTML on a screen. I find a PDF more enjoyable and easier to read. Sorry Jakob, I don't think that books are endangered by the web. There's something comforting about the standard way of navigating a document (it's called reading) which I learned as a child that PDF leverages. Anyway, the reason I'm learning XML, XSLT and XSL-FO, and the rest of the W3C alphabet soup, is so we can write software that allows texts to adapt themselves to the reader and her environment. Arguing that one should distribute documents as Postscript rather than PDF reminds me of the time-wasting debate between Beta and VHS. Of course, Beta was better all around, except in marketing ("Can you say Xerox PARC?"). In the end, they are both being replaced with DVD, and a whole new set of arguments. It's like arguing whether the MP3 file format is harmful?