This was a long rant that I pretty much agree with, except at the conclusion I still don't know what the author is trying to propose. What is this supposed new "WYGIWYM" paradigm?
Anyway, every recent time I've had to use a word processor, what I wished I could have done instead is write the whole thing simply in HTML or Markdown, and have a separate style sheet to choose all the fonts, font sizes, layout, etc. I pretty strongly feel this type of workflow should completely replace document editing, and should have done long ago. I know a lot of people prefer a more WYSIWYG style for writing, but that's fine: you can provide a word-processor-like interface, but instead of manually styling the text piece by piece, you assign from predefined styles, which of course you also have control over, but separately from the content. I think Libreoffice allows you work somewhat like this if you know what you're doing, but it's pretty clunky and certainly not obvious, and I haven't used it enough to say for sure.
By the way, IMO there's nothing wrong with obsessing over the minutiae of how content looks. However, I would never want to prevent a reader from changing literally anything about my site's styling to suit their own needs or desires. My carefully chosen styling is meant for the 99% of cases where people just load the site in a stock browser, and for the other 1% who choose to override the styles, it should also "just work."
This was a long rant that I pretty much agree with, except at the conclusion I still don't know what the author is trying to propose. What is this supposed new "WYGIWYM" paradigm?
Anyway, every recent time I've had to use a word processor, what I wished I could have done instead is write the whole thing simply in HTML or Markdown, and have a separate style sheet to choose all the fonts, font sizes, layout, etc. I pretty strongly feel this type of workflow should completely replace document editing, and should have done long ago. I know a lot of people prefer a more WYSIWYG style for writing, but that's fine: you can provide a word-processor-like interface, but instead of manually styling the text piece by piece, you assign from predefined styles, which of course you also have control over, but separately from the content. I think Libreoffice allows you work somewhat like this if you know what you're doing, but it's pretty clunky and certainly not obvious, and I haven't used it enough to say for sure.
By the way, IMO there's nothing wrong with obsessing over the minutiae of how content looks. However, I would never want to prevent a reader from changing literally anything about my site's styling to suit their own needs or desires. My carefully chosen styling is meant for the 99% of cases where people just load the site in a stock browser, and for the other 1% who choose to override the styles, it should also "just work."