On Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:35:10 -0400, Bil Kleb <Bil.Kleb / NASA.gov> wrote:

> As part of their "best Ajax" article:
>   http://www.ddj.com/dept/architect/192203368?pgno=7
>   Welcome to the 1980s. Want to make text bold? You'll
>   have to put the characters * and * around it. For big

As always, Different Strokes for Different Folks.

Applications like Word and, apparently, Writeboard aren't word processors  
anymore. They are desktop publishers. People spend way to much time  
"prettying up" throw-away documents, such as interoffice memos (IOM),  
email, etc. E.g. A lot of people at my employer use Word to write an IOM  
announcing, say, someones promotion. 5k of text becomes 200k+ with the  
logo in the header, formatting commands and so on. Who knows how much time  
they spend changing paragraph indentation, kerning, line spacing, etc.

Very often I need something just a little more expressive than standard  
text. Perhaps a bulleted list, emphasis here and there, maybe links to  
external resources. I find RedCloth (in the form of Textile) to be  
excellent for this purpose.

In effect the DDJ article reviewers were looking for Word, and wound up  
bashing a markup language.

Regards,
   JJ

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