"One day you wake up and everything is on a wiki somewhere. How did that happen? It happens in much the same way as typewriters suddenly disappeared—because a better alternative arrived. Word—and I know I'll be attacked for saying this—is the new typewriter."
Well maybe not on a wiki somewhere but somewhere in the cloud. And doubtless it will happen. From the point of view of people like this writer who are concerned with finding the real document / the most recent / the final version of a document. For many others the reality is still the printout.
What everyone had lost track of in the heat of battle was why we were still using Word (or OpenOffice Writer, which is—let's face it—just a clone of Word) to create documents that were likely never going to be printed.
Yes, maybe this is true, but a document is in many people's minds something that could be printed out--even if in reality it will never be. It is only when the document on the screen becomes the real document--in people's minds--and the printout is seen as only a copy, an instance of that reality that the shift will have been made.
I think that the regularity and rules of design that have accreted around the 8 1/2 x 11 page have given it the authority of some consistency (a replacement of the typewriter created page). And a new design standard of an electronic document will have to replace this, and perhaps the author is correct in finding this (at least for himself) in the wiki page
Wikipedia's CSS files automatically make everything look pretty, and more importantly, consistently pretty.
