Wizzy Wig
Created by Jenifer Holcombe Soykan (Syracuse University) on March 06, 2006
WYSIWYG - “What you see is what you get” - Just learned that acronym even though I’ve been using FrontPage and Dreamweaver for some time. How funny! How can I be so computer literate on the one hand and so clueless on the other hand.
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I find it immensely frustrating when the writer of HTML specifies for me how many pixels wide the text will be and so I have to scroll horizontally back and forth each line if my screen window is not as wide as the SOB writer ordained.
Of course this means that the HTML editor can't possibly display what every user will see - so perhaps "WYSIWYG" is simply an inappropriate label/concept for HTML editors!
The main issue is user control over the display, like you suggest. Users can bump up the font size and turn off stylesheets, for example, meaning what they see ain't what you got. Or they may simply have different screen resolutions or window sizes.
That and equipment differences, lack of standards compliance by browsers, etc. make it IMO conceptually impossible to have a WYSIWYG editor, though a graphical (icons, pointy-clicky, etc.) editor is no problem.
Yes, it's a bit picky, but I think the difference helps clarify something different and perhaps potentially even more democratic about web publishing, so it's a distinction worth making, especially when (as is the case for me) one is often helping people who are newbies to the whole concept of online publishing.
(AFAIK there's nothing about Bb's graphical editor that is any worse than the next one, it's just the fact that it's billed as a "WYSIWYG editor".)
In what way do you consider "a" rendering to be insufficient? I'm not sure exactly what you are getting at. Are you objecting to the "is what you get" because the user controls some aspects of the appearance? If not that, what?
I'm not familiar with editing HTML in BlackBoard - what's the problem?
What would make an editor WSIWYG?
Curious minds want to know.
WYSIWYG is a misnomer in web-editing tools, IMO, as the proliferation of pejorative acronyms suggests. FP and Dreamweaver use a graphical editing interface (as opposed to command-based, typing-based, etc.) and people often think of such tools as WYSIWYG. But just because it shows *a* rendering of the code as you compose it doesn't mean WYSIWYG applies.
It's especially frustrating when e.g. Blackboard adds a graphical HTML editor to its textboxes and bills it as WYSIWYG. It ain't, and it perpetuates misconceptions about the web -- and stifles real innovation in documents -- when it's billed as such.
WTSIWSYG certainly has a place, but there is an established and on-going bachlash best summed up but WYSIAYG (what you see is all you've got).
The best example of WTSIWSYG, is hand-styled HTML, which looks great (on the platform and browser it was crafted for), but whose semantic meaning is inaccessable to programs. Formats such as TEI tie their XML tag definitions to explicit semantic information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIAYG
http://www.tei-c.org/