How do you make it easy for end-users to produce XML documents?
Jon Udell, in a recent Byte discussion thread:
“There is a tremendous need for this sort of thing. Everybody wants the results that flow from well-structured documents. Nobody wants to write documents that way, though.
The obstacles appear to be twofold:
- Hard to get users excited about the idea of document structure.
- Hard to implement a UI that smoothly operates at both the structural and presentation level.”
I could tell stories about this (and sometimes do), but Jon sums it up almost perfectly. Making this kind of software looks so easy – but so far nobody seems even close to getting it right.