Word Processing With Markup Codes
| Word Processing | What field the skill applies to |
| mid 1990s | An approximation of when the skill was made obsolete |
| WYSIWYG graphical interfaces | The skill or item that made this skill obsolete |
| 'markup codes specific to each word processing program | The knowledge needed to perform the skill |
| creating web pages with HTML and creating documents with XML markup | When this skill could still be used in the real world |
In the beginning, there was text. And that was it. graphics were an expensive luxury, in terms of resources, while a single text character could be efficiently encoded with a mere 8 bits of data.
In those times, you had your choice of two styles of printer for your output, dot matrix and daisy wheel. The daisy wheel, and also the IBM Selectric, which used a golf ball type head, had individual letters, cast in metal, which printed out a whole character at a time. You changed fonts by pausing the printer during its output, changing the daisy wheel or golf ball typehead, and having it resume printing.
The dot matrix printer used a matrix, typically 9×6, to make characters out of dots (mechanical dot matrix printers had individual metal rods or pegs which struck a ribbon, while inkjet printers sprayed ink on a page, and thermal printers heated specially treated paper, but they also used a matrix of dots for their printing). The advantage to that was that you could change fonts, to italic or bold, or serif or sans serif, simply by sending the appropriate software code to the printer, in line with the print data, and you could also print graphical images.
But to do this, you had to the codes appropriate for your printer, and whatever codes were necessary in your word processor program, and include them in your document at the appropriate places.
You still have to do that in current word processors. The difference between now and then is that program hides the codes from you, alters the text you see on the screen and generates the codes for the printer. (Although these days, even having printer-specific code in an application is so last decade.)
This is one reason why dedicated word processor machines were so popular during the early PC era.
For scientific purposes there are still a large number of people who use markup languages for editing texts. The LaTeX? system is still used by a lot of people. It produces documents to a much higher standard then WYSIWYG editors do.
Though there are of course WYSIWYG LaTeX? Editors (like Scientific Word) ;)
