What follows is only partly related to the overall conversation, rather an answer to the ribbon episode.
The ribbon in MS Office came along roughly at the same time as 16:9 and 16:10 screens (on laptops in my memories anyway). Already on a 4:3 screen, WYSIWYG editing wastes much space on left and right of the screen, to show paper margins and page limits. And that goddamned ribbon eats up all the top of the screen, making you see only a limited band of what you could see on that very screen. Had no one the idea to make the ribbon a vertical tool bar on the left or right, like in Photoshop/Gimp and a number of other tools? Such a feeling of UI failure at the time. At that moment my computers were already all running Linux anyway, so I've never used it more than a few times on a coworker's machine.
Now I no longer use WYSIWYG software. Text editing with the WYSIWYG paradigm feels superficially seducing, until you realize it actually hides the actual document content. How many times has Word shown some items in a bullet list with a different size without any visible reason ? Or in Google docs one bullet horizontally misaligned? Why? No one knows.
When editing text, seeing how the final document would look like is not that important. It's more important to know the state of what you're editing. With markdown or asciidoc what you see it what your document actually contains.
On top of that, WYSIWIG assumes that there is one final document appearance, which is just not true for a digital document in a digital world that could be rendered countless ways in different styles (unless your workflow targets documents in try-to-mimick-paper-form, like PDF, until that changes).
The ribbon in MS Office came along roughly at the same time as 16:9 and 16:10 screens (on laptops in my memories anyway). Already on a 4:3 screen, WYSIWYG editing wastes much space on left and right of the screen, to show paper margins and page limits. And that goddamned ribbon eats up all the top of the screen, making you see only a limited band of what you could see on that very screen. Had no one the idea to make the ribbon a vertical tool bar on the left or right, like in Photoshop/Gimp and a number of other tools? Such a feeling of UI failure at the time. At that moment my computers were already all running Linux anyway, so I've never used it more than a few times on a coworker's machine.
Now I no longer use WYSIWYG software. Text editing with the WYSIWYG paradigm feels superficially seducing, until you realize it actually hides the actual document content. How many times has Word shown some items in a bullet list with a different size without any visible reason ? Or in Google docs one bullet horizontally misaligned? Why? No one knows.
When editing text, seeing how the final document would look like is not that important. It's more important to know the state of what you're editing. With markdown or asciidoc what you see it what your document actually contains.
On top of that, WYSIWIG assumes that there is one final document appearance, which is just not true for a digital document in a digital world that could be rendered countless ways in different styles (unless your workflow targets documents in try-to-mimick-paper-form, like PDF, until that changes).