Wait, you mean your document layout program isn't good at generating web pages?!
I don't understand how people can write articles like this. I remember reading something similar a few years back where someone criticized Wordpress because, "it is designed as a blogging platform from the ground up, it doesn’t lend itself to people who want to build a website without a blog."
When I wrote an article on it at the time, I compared this line of thinking to "because this car was build to drive on the road, it doesn't lend itself well to serving as a boat".
Yes, you could use a boat as a car, and yes there are better boats than a car, but that doesn't mean it's a valid point against cars.
The thing is, for a lot of non-technical people, it IS easier, just because they know how to use it. My friend was asked to make a website with CMS capabilities for his church. They were putting up Drupal or Joomla or something like that, demoing all the features, saying "isn't this so cool and great?"
The church committee stared at them blankly and asked, "Can we have something simple like write something up in MS Word?" Even with WYSIWYG features, they didn't get it at all, but they did get MS Word. My friend tried to protest saying, "But actually, you don't want MS Word. This is so much better for technical reasons, and you can format text exactly the same, blahblahblah."
The fear that non-technical people have to try to use a brand new system they've never seen before is not something with which I'd ever be able to empathize. But I am able to sympathize, especially after the day I tried to teach my dad how to use gmail to attach photos (using gmail's drag and drop feature no less!). It was so frustrating to see he didn't get drag and drop, but he finally did manage to click some buttons, after a LOT of hesitation.
Non-technical users don't care that Word adds on all that garbage. They don't even notice. They do care that their experience is that Word just works. And they're afraid of changing.
I know that none of this really matters. More and more people seem to be getting more technically savvy every day. New technologies will leave old technologies behind, whether late adopters like it or not. Heck, even my dad can use gmail now. But part of me feels mean and guilty for making these non-technical people suffer through the transition. Not that I have any solution for that issue.
I don't think people who use Word were ever going to produce nice-looking web pages anyway, and I'm _sure_ they won't care about how ridiculous the code is. If they're satisfied with it, fine; if they're not, shouldn't they just be looking for a tool which is actually meant for the job?
Because I like analogies: I'm really bad with woodworking. Everything I do ends out being really hacky because (I'm usually told this after) I don't use the right tools. Even if I can use a saw for something other than its intended purpose, is it really the saw's fault if it performs worse than the right tool for the job?
There's something in here that says to me that if you just wrapped the tool's (wordpress, drupal, joomla, whathaveyou) admin page in a theme that made it look like a Microsoft Office app, people would warm up to it more. It's amazing the effort that people will put into figuring out how to do something (effectively half-assed, but still be reasonably successful) with Access, and end up doing it wrong, purely because it looks like the rest of the Office apps they know, when they could put just as much effort into another, more proper tool. And it's inexplicable how people will put the time into learning to use something that doesn't doesn't look like an Office app at all, like an Access database or some Word Basic application that runs inside of Word (where the buttons are all misaligned and the colors are inconsistent and the screens are just massive grids of buttons), purely because it's spawned from inside an Office app.
However, making anything look like a Microsoft Office app is offensive to anyone who actually knows how to use these tools.
Telling someone a website is not the right solution for someone happens from time to time. If they are unable or unwilling to abandon Word, this can be the case.
> Wait, you mean your document layout program isn't good at generating web pages?!
Yes, that's the whole point. The fact is that Word is still seen as the go-to default solution for text editing, but now that the web is the go-to default solution for publishing, there's a big mismatch. The purpose of this article is to highlight that mismatch.
So we need a new go-to solution for text editing, but nobody's really found it yet, and it's hard because HTML doesn't support a lot of features that people are used to in Word.
I don't understand how people can write articles like this. I remember reading something similar a few years back where someone criticized Wordpress because, "it is designed as a blogging platform from the ground up, it doesn’t lend itself to people who want to build a website without a blog."
When I wrote an article on it at the time, I compared this line of thinking to "because this car was build to drive on the road, it doesn't lend itself well to serving as a boat".
Yes, you could use a boat as a car, and yes there are better boats than a car, but that doesn't mean it's a valid point against cars.