The world is not dichotomous as the author seems to make it (as is usually the case). Word 2007 blurs the distinctions he's making, because it started putting in formats like "Title" and "Body" instead of just "14pt" and "Arial" (or verdanna or whatever). If the author is using these semantic meta-styles appropriately, they can get most of the advantages of a LaTeX style of coding, in a WYSIWYG interface.
I'm more for than against the author's main point fo separation of concerns, even in the realm of text processing, and I think especially for corporate communications that have to be all branded and specified, a LaTeX style document is probably the way to go. However, the overhead of having to code your document, instead of write it, is a big interface barrier, both in terms of adoption, and in terms of productivity. Also, in the cases where you do care about presentation during the construction of your document (which do arise), having a sharp divide between the two processes makes for a lot of annoying context-switching. I'm sure I'm not the only one with a horror story of having to compile a TeX document dozens of times to make a damn picture align correctly. Word isn't perfect in this respect either, but my worst-case horror story is not nearly as bad (5 minutes of drag-and-dropping).
You can, if you are careful, achieve effects such as changing the appearance of all section headings with one command. But few users of Word exploit this consistently, and that is not surprising: the WYSIWYG approach does not encourage concern with structure.
Yes, but he's talking about people who have no idea how to use Word properly. How would similarly "skilled" people fare with TeX? I mean, what, you don't need to be "careful" writing all that "/this is a level 2 heading" stuff into your ASCII document?
In years long past, I did some programmatic document creation with Word 97 & VBA. Even then, you could specify formats like "Title" and "Body". They were called Styles, and they worked fairly well.
I'm more for than against the author's main point fo separation of concerns, even in the realm of text processing, and I think especially for corporate communications that have to be all branded and specified, a LaTeX style document is probably the way to go. However, the overhead of having to code your document, instead of write it, is a big interface barrier, both in terms of adoption, and in terms of productivity. Also, in the cases where you do care about presentation during the construction of your document (which do arise), having a sharp divide between the two processes makes for a lot of annoying context-switching. I'm sure I'm not the only one with a horror story of having to compile a TeX document dozens of times to make a damn picture align correctly. Word isn't perfect in this respect either, but my worst-case horror story is not nearly as bad (5 minutes of drag-and-dropping).