All this sounds as if the act of typing is a lot more different from old style typing than it is. Sure, youre moving the mouse around, clicking to bring out other keyings (or clickings) and working all that into your tapping rhythms. And you use a lot more key combinations than in the old days, when you only used a shift+ combination to get upper case keys. You might have been in a machine like Microsofts Word for Windows in which two of the three possible shift keys (Shift, Ctrl, Alt) are held down as you also press another key. Winword may even have a few calling for all three shift keys. In eWriter, youll never hold down two shift keys to type and will never have to for the more exotic actions you can type into happening. So you wont feel like you are taking piano lessons, learning how to play chords.
Some of the real differences... are the result of our typing a new sort of manuscript. In the old days you just typed out typescript manuscript. Today wed describe it as monospaced typewriter-like characters. If your manuscript was to be published, it was retyped on a very different sort of machine (such as a Linotype machine) or was even hand-set with small lead letters and metal spacers of varying thickness. A writer typing out his or her (es) manuscript almost certainly visualized some optimal publication that would be quite different from the manuscript rolling out of the typewriter.
Today, the manuscript can be an engine that in fact serves as input to a publishing machine. In a word processor such as Word for Windows which I already mentioned, a writer never sees the manuscript. It is a file containing the text and embedded items and embedded tags that direct the publishing machine. Even while writing, the writer sees published output appearing as rapidly as he or she (e) types. Anybody who wants to see that published (the only) copy must have a Winword that is the same or a later version as it was typed in. You can see the file in some viewers, but you cant make sense of the tags. Its a proprietary format.
HTML is a set of tags that humans can read. And the manuscript in a typewriter like eWriter is easily read. In fact, the typewriter and the publishing machine are pulled apart. The publishing machine is a (web) browser. Now, your manuscript is an engine ...driving the browser to produce interface copies on the screen or on paper.
In a word processor, you dont think about typing that engine page, the manuscript. You type through it, in a sense. You hit Ctrl+I and never give a thought to signaling the publishing machine to go into italics because you see italics, not signals, right on your screen. Now, in our email connected world with its plain text open messages, the manuscript isnt under the hood, with the whole hood being passed along. When you receive an email, you will probably see the manuscript before moving it to a parser and presenter. courteous writers, who know that doubled reading has its uses in many contexts, will write manuscripts for easy and quick reading in manuscript form. I usually use indented text in not too long lines. This leaves a gutter to the left and those tags that are not inline (not italics, bold, some uses of font w/ attributes) are pushed to the left and, with white space, help to set text out clearly. For instance, Ill be at the margin and type Ctrl+P to get a <P> there and drop my cursor to a new line underneath. I then hit Tab to make my gutter. I turn off word-wrap and at about column 68-70 I hit Shift+Return which creates a new line with the same indent as the line above. I can even skip a line by hitting Shift+Return twice. The spaces entered on the skipped line are removed.
The greatest single difference... is the batch typing and casting forward of frame punctuation. Batch typing means that you hit a key or, more often, a key combination involving one of the shifting keys, and instead of a single punctuation mark (or tag) you get two marks (or tags) at a minimum. And, maybe, an entire template to later return to and fill in or a complete passage of some sort. In eWriter, for instance, typing Ctrl+( (or Ctrl+9, actually) gets (|) or both parenthesis marks and the cursor between them. You wont easily forget that you are typing a parenthetical insert. This is framework punctuation. You cast some of a group of punctuation marks out in front of you and write into the marked off interval. Most tags come in just such pairs and, indeed, are called, together with their content, elements. In eWriter, from 0.9i or j, maybe earlier, you can type in a stack of buttons like those used in this essay with a single mouse click, about like youd type in a semicolon with a single keystroke. Starting with 0.9l+ (thats el-plus), you can put in an n x m Table Frame with a similar single click. After the click, you see two pop-up boxes and put in a number of rows and then a number of columns ...just as if you were typing the numbers into the text itself. But eWriter types that table frame down the page, with a commented number after each <TR>, <TH>, and <TD>.
Im not a Mozart, presumed to be writing down whole symphonies or operas resting complete within imagination, but Ive always cast punctuation and other markers out in front of me, written into shapes that do rest within my imagination, though they are only vague guidings. It seemed pretty natural to me to exteriorize this sort of activity into my typewriter. I dont know how useful it will be to a typist, presumably typing from copy. Id guess that a typist is reading a bit ahead of es (his or her) typing. Suppose the handwritten note has tags. A sharp typist, seeing, say, an <I> might simply type it as seen or might actually hit Ctrl+I and, then, type behind the </I> until seeing it in the copy and jumping over the pushed one with, say, an End hit. Or a typist might read and translate other signals from the copy. The writer might underline italicized text. So, again, the Ctrl+I and the End to jump the closing tag at the end. You can see that even typing from copy takes more mind in our information age. A typist becomes, in a sense, a typesetter, a publishing assistant, or even an art director, a designer.
In the new millennium... well be moving from an HTML controlled writing to an XML controlled writing even before any XML-defined anything is actually in your kit. The main XML impact is that communities of correspondents will define their own tagsets that, in the email and web world, will augment, not run parallel to the HTML tagset. And these new tags will, for the most part, refer to (semantic) meanings rather than to presentation. Style for screening and printing the tagged text will be attached separately. I can see the typesetter or publishing assistant from the preceding paragraph, even now, seeing a tag that says <2nd-voice> and typing that tag pair from the Tagset menu. Now, being at this point with <2nd-voice>|</2nd-voice> on the screen, instead of launching into the contained text or using Return and Shift+Spacebar to get a line for the text, the typesetter will, perhaps enter italics from the HTML menu or Ctrl+I and, within that pair from Tagset again, <FONT COLOR="blue">. Now, create the line for the text, if needed, and, in any case ...type in the text, jump over the end tags. The HTML browser will ignore the meaningful tag, but put the contents in the blue italics the dictator wanted. Doubled reading tells the reader why the passage is in blue italics if e doesnt know. If you want to use boilerplate to set up these compound (nested) tag sets, given that you cant put the cursor in the middle, put the series of Start tags on one key and the series of End tags on another. That way, youd type Ctrl+1, your text, and Ctrl+2. (Those numbers are 1...8 on the top of the keyboard, not the number pad. Boilerplate sets are swapped in and out using Tools/Boilerplate Sets.)
Typing is, indeed, a little bit different ...nowadays.