I am sure a lot of you are aware of WYSIWYG. Most of the editors where you can select the font, the style and the colors are WYSIWYG editors, where the underlying markup is hidden under these GUI controls for formatting. I got introduced to What You See Is What You Mean (WYSIWYM) through Peter Krantz. The difference can be expressed in one word – semantics – but makes a world of difference!
This is one of the reasons I do not like to use WYSIWYG editors, whether online or offline, I use the ones where markup can be typed, either directly or through text generators like Markdown or Textile. I do not want to work on formatting while writing, I want to work on semantics. Formatting will be handled by stylesheets. Peter mentions WYMEditor, that is intended to be an editor that stresses on meanings rather than formattings. This should help a lot. Like Peter says CMSs should lookout for it. And I will too!
December 6th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
I agree. I integrated Textile into my site and I don’t think I could ever go back to WYSIWYG.
December 9th, 2006 at 5:40 pm
Yes, Textile and Markup can really ease writing markup. WYSIWYG really seems inefficient when compared to those.
January 13th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
[...] For any of the above tasks I have to go back to the source view to type HTML. I end up composing my post in parts with blanks which I fill in later. Instead of this I like the default editor I get with Wordpress or vim. I also feel that WYSIWYM will be the future for editors as they will play the role of creating content in the whole content-style separation paradigm. [...]
September 22nd, 2007 at 1:53 pm
[...] In fact, I do not use the visual editors at all. They are still not there with the accuracy and end up creating mess sometimes. I also think they are detrimental to Web design. The styles belong to the CSS, not the markup. The markup should contain only the CSS classes and IDs which work as a handle to the styles. Further, I think the future is not WYSIWYG, it is WYSIWYM. [...]
January 18th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
[...] the possible dangers of copy and paste. We can start by calling them something else. I thought WYSIWYM was a great alternative. However, only better tools, or better documentation will not help us. We [...]