WYSIWYG editors: And what now?

Most editors nowadays are said to be WYSIWYG (‘What you see is what you get’). Although this implies that the effects of user actions are made immediately visible to the user, this does not usually include the effects of other causes. This a logical consequence of the fact that the user edits a copy of the document, rather than the document itself. These kind of systems then, can better be classified as ‘What you see is what you will get’ systems. This report describes an editor model that is a further extension of the WYSIWYG principle: ‘Things are exactly as they appear’, or TAXATA for short. In these kind of systems, the user carries out every action by editing, and what is more important, by editing the object directly. Furthermore, modifications made to objects by the system are made immediately visible to the user. Amongst other things, the reports describes the underlying model and the necessary editing concepts to construct such a TAXATA editor environment, based on general user-interface principles. Finally the design of one particular edit command has been described, to give an impression of the specific design issues in such an environment.