Have today's software developers forgotten tabbed indents?

< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >

Posted by Ken
Aug 1, 2011 at 09:23 PM

I am still working on getting my iPad set up, and am finding the once commonly used “tabbed indent” to be MIA. It seems that many of the web-based outlining/list programs as well as smartphone apps have given up support of tabbed indents. Its great that they offer things like support of HTML, OPML or XML, but I always found that working with tabbed information easily moved between programs. Outlines created in Ecco, for example, could easily be pasted into Word or Excel documents, and they fully retained their structure. This does not seem to be the case with programs like Toodledo and Notebooks for iPad, as well as a host of misc. apps. Carbonfin at least honored the tabbed indent structure on import, but not on export.

I find flattened text files that programs offer to export be almost impossible to work with. They are really just “snapshots” as most programs cannot work with the outline, or should I say the lack thereof, on import. Is there something about “Web 2.0” that I am not understanding, or is there something about the basic fundamentals of outlining that the current generation of software developers do not understand? I am sorry for the rant, but why do we need to discard what is old and reliable when it works so well? As somebody who does not work with HTML, I do not find its presenc as an export option to be a substitute for data which retains its tabbed format when exported. Any thoughts or words of wisdom?

—Ken

Back to topic list