Markdown vs WSYWYG

Posted by 22111
Sep 13, 2013 at 04:59 PM

Some very interesting points indeed.

Total integration is desirable.

I perfectly convene, but let’s remember this is just a conceptual problem. Don’t forget we are speaking here of “individual, pc software”, und this almost always supposes, traditionally, one database, and indeed, some critics of Zoot say that it grows too big, becomes unmanageable, and so on - I cannot speak of Zoot here, but I perfectly know that anybody who’d ever try to do such a thing for a corporation of 10, 100 or 10,000 staff, should be considered nuts.

So we must always remember that the paradigm we almost always encounter with software here, is bound to be confined into “pc” uses, and that any real solution must treat data in a completely different way, the main tool just being a referential database “that brings it all together, any which way, in any combination you would ever want”, the real data being stored in multiple databases from which then they are fetched, and then it becomes possible to integrate it really all, even for a corporation of 1 million staff.

Also, dedicated CRM, and dedicated DMS, tools, try to do this, on a “pc” level, and often I read reports that they become unmanageable, from poor response times, and so on. Myself, I own Act! 2000 (which I didn’t use anymore, for AS (see in other threads)), and have trialled a newer version of it… just to throw it out after some hour of frustration; but I suppose this is for very poor programming, and of course a front-end to a desktop database should be able to do whatever newer versions of Act! can do, with much better response times.

Your second point, such tools should DO it all.

Here, I convene again, and in fact, my research (my Sohodox review here was not by accident) goes into the file system, since having one “main program”, but which does only parts of the tasks you have to do, is far from brilliant, and so you should have some other “point of departure”, in the end, than have your “main program” but which lacks this functionality, and a second one, and a third one, and so on.

We convene that you cannot put all this functionality into just one program, which would become a monster, lacking still any detail, special functionality. On the other hand, why your markdown hint here? I want bolded passages bolded, italicised passages italicized, and so on, and if the program in question does this by markdown, so be it! I am just asking for wysiwyg, in text, remember, graphic programs today don’t do it without colors neither, today, but these were the very early years of graphic programs, where in fact you designed your objects by just vectors, and then had some special “preview” mode in order to see the results; these times are gone for graphics, why defend such poor implementation for text processing, in 2013?

Again, remember, I just want to have wysiwyg, I am NOT asking for a special format to arrive at this result, and in particular, I am not asking for rtf. In fact, most of my things are then published within the html format, so they are to be exported from rtf into html, and I would never complain if the outliner of my choice did store them in that html format up-front, as long as on the screen, I see bolded words bolded, and so on. And I quickly agree that the common rtf format is something from the past, and could easily replaced by something more suitable today. But why should I have those codes on screen, like Ventura Publisher 1985? That’s simply not necessary today.

But back to the initial problem, you point is on the spot, especially since I have been thinking for months now that indeed, it is a totally wrong strategy to try to put your file system into your outliner tree (and then have numerous synch problems), something tools like UR try to promote; it’s certainly much more natural to start off from the file system (or from tool exactly replicating it, meaning a better gui for that very file system), and then consider your outliner = data repository for TEXT data and such, NOT for “everything”, as just ONE part of your overall system, just as are other data formats.

I think you need some “nucleus” for your work, but if this nucleus is your 2-pane outliner, it invariably tries to “replace” the file system within your workflow, and this inevitably brings about multiple problems, for your outliner’s lack of capability to really REPLICATE the file system, in real-time. (At the end of the day, this would only be a technical, “programming-expertise” problem, but I am not even sure that such a SHIFT in “nucleus role”, from file system to outliner, would be that desireable.)

Relative importance, depending on time and context

This is the most demanding of your points, and in fact, I have been thinking of these problems for some time, also with respect to physical files in the office, because every conception of “which files on your desk, which files near your desk, which files in your office, which files within the archive” is bound to answer exactly this question, of relative importance, and even relative context, and it’s evident that depending on context and time, this has to be a totally “chaotic”, multiple re-assigning of “everything to anything else”, and this problem, for physical files, has never been quite resolved.

Also, in my post above, I did not want to say, every “reference material” should/would/could become “writing material”, and vice versa, but then, it’s evident that you never can be sure, for most of your stuff, which parts of it will remain the nature they now have, and which parts will become something else, even in multiple contexts, while also keeping their current nature, at the same time: the variations here are endless (and of course, some “natural” reference material stays exactly that during its whole lifetime).

I’ve become an expert in these “physical files’ management” questions by now, and I have to admit that I don’t have found a valid answer to these questions; I have tried to get really any information about these questions that are available in numerous countries (and yes, it’s very interesting that in different countries, very different “answers” get universally accepted, but only there).

And now the paradox: We all would assume that for electronic files, within the pc, those answers would be very much simpler; we all know about crazy corporations that do 10 photocopies of the same document, then create total chaos with them throughout the company; in an electronic system, with clones (cf. Sohodox that does not even offer them), it should be easy to bring perfect order into your stuff…

(I am not speaking here of the hybridity problems, caused by the coexistence of physical and electronic files, which really over-complicates it all; interesting here, most software for “physical file management” I would not touch, since their integration into the management of your electronic files is either inexistant or so bad that multiple problems arise which nobody would ever accept deliberately.)

But now we see that even for our electronic stuff, we have endloss problems with our categorization, with our taxonomy. Why? Because there is one taxonomy, which, once you introduce clones (of files AND of folders, especially!), does not represent any big problem anymore, but there is “processing”, overlaid over this taxonomy, and here, endless problems begin, and you mentioned them; it’s all about “AVAILABILITY”, and even of “IMPOSING”, meaning some things that should be in the background, today, or in this context, are “LEFT-OVERS” from former prominence, and do disturb, divert your attention, distract the clarity of your searches, and so on.

The real problem is, for every single task (if those are not extremely standardized, as perhaps in the treatance of assurance claims, and even there…), you need myriads of contextual elements, but never the same.

In fact, in a perfect world, you’d need either AI, or you’d need endless time for your staff to SELECT the relevant context, for any single task, and that’s technically impossible.

Any “NATURAL context”, as I call it (you also could call it “DEFAULT context”), in outliners, is a BIG help to begin with (and which could be replaced, indeed, by VERY specific tagging), but of course, you also need SPECIFIC context, and that’s almost impossible to gather, by technical means, because, yes, you can do clones of everything, but you first have to SPECIFY those clones, which implies that you must identify and find them, first, and this is time-consuming and expensive (and for physical files, you will have to manage that there are (normally) no clones, meaning other staff treating similar dossiers will not have those (perhaps relevant) elements at their disposal then), so most of the time, relevant “information”, relevant “contextual elements” will be missing in your treatance of the dossier on your desk, and this is valid both for physical as for electronic files (and both for physical and for electronic “additional elements” to such dossiers).

From my experience, in the legal world, very, exceptional smart lawyers “just think of it”: They seem to have both an elephant’s memory for (totally disparate) “things”, and the ability to “think of those”, whenever those elements might be of relevance, or “could be used”.

And now, from our electronic system, we demand something similar: To present us the relevant elements - but only those - for our task at hand; the problem here, as explained above, those elements are in part standardized - that’s why I are so fond of outliners: those standard elements are siblings or cousins, or then, links / references there, and such a system is not so easily replicable in a tagging and / or a search-based system -, but all the “extras” are missing, in an electronic as well as in a physical file system.

And at the same time, we hope that “electronics”, software, will one day lay all these “extras” onto our “desk”, just as a very well-paid executive secretary would “think of it all”, and would indeed lay upon our desk all the “they MIGHT be relevant or useful here” things, and not only the file we have asked her for.

(The Germans have “invented” a so-called “thin-file” system, Mappei and Classei (TM in both cases), which both try to dissect physical files into their core elements, facilitating then any possible combination of those, but of course breaking any “natural” context by this, and not offering any help for combining all these disparate elements.)

This is exactly our problem now, in 2013: Software is lacking far behind our (justified) expectations; AI has NOT come to our desks and our screens yet (as has not even semantic search, which would be a good start).

Of course, the very first step would be to at least allow for easy combining such elements from everywhere, and to facilitate “loose standard combinations”, meaning that on top of the “natural contexts” within your outliners, heavily enhanced by cloning (of folders, especially!), it would also be as easy, simple and quick as possible to combine very disparate elements from “everywhere”, and to store those “working environments for specific tasks”, even supposing you have to collect them for yourself, for the time being.

It goes without saying that such a workflow, in attendence of AI, implies that in a corporation, (1) some people treat the files/dossiers, after having read them, gathering all the relevant things (but additional problem here, how to dissect them, from their respective context, irrelevant here), then (2) VERY smart people read those same dossiers, together with their “standard context” gathered in (1), and try to find “hints” to additional, special “context” that possibly might break up the “stone walls” within the problem, and have their comments how this could be done, and in step (3), again other people would develop this all, and of course there would be recursion between steps (3) and (2) whenever the (3) people are “stuck”: (1) = highly specialized secretaries; (2) laywers and such; (3) high-brows; the same principle would apply to non-legal tasks.

But as said, real elaborate software to facilitate and help with this is missing in 2013; human memory, and human ability is always needed to THINK of those “elements possibly relevant in this context here”, in order for them to be added to the current context bunch.

And now compare with development in software we are discussing here, 30 years after the introduction of the pc.

(The Brain seemingly does a big part of its business within corporations; I often think about their possible capabilities to provide some of those missing functionlity there at least, but I don’t see any. But you see it’s easy to think up a corporate software that easily asks for 2,500 dollars per seat, but which has got everything we all are missing in our software every day.)