Comment by cxr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cxr | Hacker News Reader

The LibreOffice project's imprimatur should be to stop existing. This isn't facetious or snark. Make it a long-term goal—let's say 15 years.

The editing paradigm perpetuated by the legacy of MS Office is a dead end. The web has its shortcomings, so it's easy to see why people opt for MS Office-based workflows, but the end goal should be to wean businesses off contemporary word processors and raise a generation of kids who aren't taught to write essays in Microsoft Word or any other office suite that resembles the ones we see today. A standardized "Markdown for the Web" (or AsciiDoc) with native browser support would be a good 80/20 start and would move things out of weird proprietary office formats and towards plain text. Users themselves need not know the underlying file format is based on plain text, just like most don't know that HTML is plain text—because they usually aren't even aware of HTML in the first place. (Besides word processing, spreadsheets are a whole other larger problem that can be handled once there's traction on this front.)

Right now LibreOffice is aligned against this goal as a result of perverse incentives to continue perpetuating the MS Office model of document creation, editing, and (let's face it: email-based) distribution.

The failure of standards bodies and browser developers to address the real needs of MS Office customers should not be discounted. Heck, even EPUB which is largely (X)HTML isn't even really Web-native, and that's a total failure on the part of browser makers.

It might be prudent for the commercial companies associated with LibreOffice to stop thinking of themselves as vendors of an MS Office alternative and start thinking of themselves as a group who can see where the puck should be, and then move both the Web and businesses+classrooms there, too—and capitalize on being the first mover.

NB: Re-inventing the office suite as a web app (à la Google Docs) is not the kind of thing I'm talking about.

I'm not sure I understand why you think this would be a good goal.

Plaintext formats are certainly nice. Markdown can certainly do formatting for many simple documents (school reports, memos, etc). Sometimes, however, you want more fine-grained, print-style control over layout, even for documents that are often sent electronically (e.g., résumés). People still do print things out too, like fliers and signup sheets.

A lot of Word's other features seem superfluous, but I'd bet that almost everyone uses an idiosyncratic subset of them: I don't use mail merge, but depend on "Compare Documents", for example.

> I'm not sure I understand why you think this would be a good goal.

You do already know. It's in your next sentence.

> Sometimes, however, you want more fine-grained, print-style control

That's fine. PDFs aren't going away, nor would aiming for the kind of thing I mentioned preclude the plaintext formats from finally gaining the ability to control print-level details with a set of formatting directives if you flip the switch in the writing app to make it let you target a "print profile" for that document. In fact TeX—being a plaintext format that also happens to lead to many of the PDFs we see anyway—is already an example of how to get the ultimate "fine-grained, print-style control" without being a clunky document from an office suite, which aren't actually all that great at that level of control, anyway (but TeX itself is not well-suited for this use case, for its own reasons).

The point is that most people shuttling Office documents around are most of the time not using it for those reasons, so their 80% use cases shouldn't carry the baggage nor impose it on others. It would be one thing if it were just a matter of people not knowing, but the reality is that neither the tooling nor the cultural inertia for those non-existent tools are really where they should be.

> People still do print things out too, like fliers and signup sheets.

nonsequitur

Print-style control is not done in Word, it's done in Publisher.

In typical office use, you'd want to enforce a firm-wide stylesheet, but Word makes that difficult by leaving too much control too easy to access: people continue to use font and paragraph ribbon groups outside creating new styles.

The things that make Word valuable, compared to plain text, are in the “Review” (track changes, comments, compare), and “Insert” tabs. “References” and “Mailings” are nice if you need them, but can ultimately be handled in easier ways.

Whatever the kind of thing you're talking about is, I don't see why the companies associated with LibreOffice would be in a good position to do it, how they can see where the puck should be better then anyone else.

You are talking about Word, not the entirety of Office. Excel does not have similar alternatives.

“The LibreOffice project's imprimatur should be to stop existing.”

100% agree with that. But your proposed substitute is nonsense on stilts. Markdown? Please. WYSIWYG exists for a reason.

LibreOffice’s problem is that it’s playing Microsoft Office’s game by Microsoft Office’s rules. That is a game it cannot win. Microsoft Office succeeds not by being good at what it does but by being a massive monolith that no-one else can match. Those who try to replicate it only work themselves to death trying to do so. That’s a fools’ game.

Instead of trying to build a better Office, look at what users try to/actually do with it and target that. For starters, a lot of people use Excel not as a programmable parallel calculator (spreadsheet) but as a tabular layout tool for ad-hoc/databaseable information. So build a grid layout tool that is entirely agnostic on programmability and back-end storage, and allow different components to plug in as needed.

I’m always leery of pointing to component architectures like OpenDoc as those are a whole ’nother honeytrap in themselves, but Unix Philosophy posited that lots of small, simple, highly focused, and freely pluggable tools would scale better to solving users’ problems than the vast impenetrable monolithic architectures of Office et al. Unix/Linux may have failed to pay its own philosophy more than lip service (I mean, how many features is `ls` up to now? 50? 100?), but whereas MS Office is also mired in its own market success it’s never too late for the also-rans to rethink their losers’ game and rewrite its rules to be one they can win. They just have to want to change, and try something that hasn’t been tried.

And yes, change means risk and potential for [greater] failure. But just look at Steve Jobs: he never beat Microsoft by building a better PC; he did it by radically redefining what “Personal Computing” means, inventing a completely new market of Personal Computing users, and being first to that market with the right product to sell them.

So, no, an Office suite that runs in a web browser is not the sort of thing I’m talking about either. Although the web should, as you say, provide the foundation for a modern data editing and sharing system. But look at what people actually do today with “Office” software, regardless of whether it’s what that software was designed to do or not, and from there pinch off one well-defined use-case at a time and reformulate it in terms of basic reusable components joined together with some task-specific glue, then push that to that market as a tool just for them that does what they need done so much quicker, easier, and safer than anything else.

(Ironically, the web originally conceived as a fully read-write platform where everyone could read and everyone could write, and it was only Berners-Lee’s corner-cutting impatience that recast it as a read-only platform with its editing keys jealously kept by a new high priesthood of “Web Developers”.)

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TL;DR: Let’s build a better “Office Suite” is the wrong game to play. “Let’s identify solve individual specific real-world problems that users actually have today”, and just happen to build those solutions in a way that keeps everything small, agile, flexible, and humble; instead of bloating into the traditional Big Ball of Mud that is wonderful for developer egos and customer lock-in and absolutely awful for anything else.

> it was only Berners-Lee’s corner-cutting impatience that recast it as a read-only platform with its editing keys jealously kept by a new high priesthood of “Web Developers”

Not accurate; this comes off as very Nelsonian. WorldWideWeb on NeXT had read-writability baked in from the beginning (same with all the the W3C's reference implementations, from Arena to Amaya). Andreessen is the one to blame for the Web being effectively read-only. His investment in RapGenius was his penitence. The mainstream browser makers are all carrying on the Netscape tradition.

> Markdown? Please. WYSIWYG exists for a reason.

They're not fundamentally opposed. Believing they are is a failure in your assumptions. ProseMirror.net.

“Not accurate; this comes off as very Nelsonian.”

Yep, TBL’s original WorldWideWeb browser was read-write. And yes, it was Andressen’s Mosaic that locked in the popular perception of the web as read-only medium.

However, it’s wrong to blame the Mosaic team as they were only following TBL’s lead here. The first read-only browser was TBL’s invention, being a quick-and-lazy way to port a lowest-common-denominator demonstrator to mainstream platforms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb

“[TBL’s] team created so called "passive browsers" which do not have the ability to edit because it was hard to port this [authoring] feature from the NeXT system to other operating systems.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_Mode_Browser

That one bad decision is one of the greatest (i.e. worst) demonstrations of the Law of Unintended Consequences in action, and deserves to be taught in every undergrad computing/psychology/marketing course, alongside the Osborne Effect and every other major disaster carelessly created by very clever people who did not ask themselves one very simple question: “What could possibly go wrong?”

(Upvoted for knowing your history. I wish many more did.)

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Re. Markdown/WYSIWYG:

“They're not fundamentally opposed.”

I’m all for combining the strengths of different UI modes, and Markdown is something I commonly use myself for structured text input. I’d even go so far as to say it’s a great shame TBL chose SGML as the foundation for HTML, rather than annotated plain text a-la Markdown. But there’s a vast gulf between expert users who benefit from such high-efficiency “shortcuts”, with their attendant learning curve and unforgivingness, and everyone else.

Again, look at word processors and spreadsheets and how many people use those Correctly vs how many just use them. Look too at how MS Office makes it more difficult to use them well (e.g. style sheets) than use them badly (direct styles). Casual users require a no-height barrier to entry and extremely low-friction usage; they cannot be asked to learn or use a professional mode UI. The primary entry point has to be WYSIWYG, because the cost of learning anything more advanced exceeds the value to be obtained from its use.

An efficient, effective UI for occasional amateur users is not the same as the UI for high-volume professional users. Ironically, while MS Office does a good job of neither, LibreOffice—in slavishly replicating all of MS’s poor design choices rather than studying them and asking how it could do better—completely fails to exploit those opportunites itself.

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Products like WWW and LO reveal a key failing of Really Smart People: those big brains of theirs just make it far too easy for them just to brute-force suboptimal solutions rapidly out the door. Just as those overpowered brains make it far too easy for them to manage the unnecessarily high costs of using those suboptimal solutions themselves. It’s everyone else who pays the full price for their failure of rigor or parsimony. But hey, I’m not complaining: makes it easier for a dumbass like me to beat them just by being a crafty bastard instead.:)

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“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”

Your whole message is trying to sell me on the idea that "low-friction" interfaces are a good thing for the common pleb, but you don't have to sell me on it. I've believed it from the start ("need not know the underlying file format is based on plain text, just like most don't know that HTML is plain text"), and you continue to ignore that WYSIWYG and the ability to be neatly based on a plain text format are not fundamentally opposed. There exist editors and viewers for Markdown today whose UIs prioritize the "rendered" view over presenting the user with, say, the raw text cast in a monospace font. I even referenced one by name.

> An efficient, effective UI for occasional amateur users is not the same as the UI for high-volume professional users.

I disagree. Specifically, I disagree that the amateur UI can't be made to work just as well much of the time for expert users, and that where it doesn't, it can still form the basis for that which is eventually exposed to the experts and will never be seen by the amateurs. For that reason, I find your big brains comment about dealing with "the unnecessarily high costs of [...] suboptimal solutions" (like "expert mode" UIs that are difficult to grapple with not because they're intended for experts, but because they're just poorly conceived) more apropos than you intended.

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