WYSIWIG stands for What You See Is What You Get. The term refers to a computing system in which a user interface allows the user to view something very similar to the final product of a document that is being created (Wikipedia (a), 2007).

Origins in DTP

Back in the day of the machine typsetter (we are talking the 1970s here), a designer’s job usually consisted of the following tasks: studying the text, determining the suitable type specifications to be applied to the text (typeface, leading etc.), marking typescript before sending the work off to the typesetter. When the work returned from the typesetter, the designer then corrected the proofs and had to send them back to the typesetter (Conrad, 1996). The process was both tiresome and inefficient primarily regarding the delay in getting visual feedback to design decisions (Conrad, 1996). As Taylor Conrad points out on his 1996 article on the WYSIWGY technology (http://www.ideography.co.uk/library/seybold/WYSIWYG.html), this was a step backwards from the days of setting type by hand. “At least when setting foundry type by hand, one had an immediate sense of how the page was building; a proof could be pulled quickly on the proofing press; and the design could be tinkered with "on the stone" by inserting or removing leading and other spacing material.”

Conrad points out that the typesetting machine process did not offer the most effective design cybernetics; there was very little control over the communication and feedback process was excruciatingly slow. Designers wanted more control over how their work would look, and more immediate feedback during the layout process.

Conrad notes that while it was clear in the late 1970s that typesetting and computing would inevitably become synonymous, it was not clear precisely how this would come about (Conrad, 1996). What occurred had to do with the research projects that were being done at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC). The centre’s pioneering research into workstation technology produced the WYSIWYG editing concept (Conrad, 1996). The WYSIWYG editor was created to bridge the gap between the software that writer and editors used to create and edit text, and the software that compositors used to typeset the documents (Conrad, 1996). The WYSIWIG enabled the designer to not only see the document (almost) exactly as it would print, but also to interact with it in real time and make necessary adjustments accordingly.

The WYSIWYG was not the obvious choice at the time. Other technologies that were created include the TeX? typsetting language and generic mark-up (precursor of SMGL). Conrad argues that the reason why the WYSIWYG dominated the competing technologies is because it (unlike the other technologies) gave immediate feedback on design and layout desicisons through the Graphic User Interface (also a technology developed at PARC).

Enter the Web

It was inevitable that designers would want the same control over the production process for the Web as they had desired in the print medium. In web publishing, a WYSIWIG HTML editor is an authoring tool that allows the user to view the content being created as it is supposed to display in a web browser (Wikipedia (b), 2007). Before the WYSIWIG HTML editor, a web designer used a text editor to create the HTML, and had to upload the HTML into a web browser in order to see how that web page would display before returning to the HTML document to make changes. This was much like the machine typesetting process print designers loathed.

How the WYSIWYG HTML editor works

The WYSIWIG HTML editor uses a layout or rendering engine embedded in the software to encode the layout information, such as the breaks and paragraphs into HTML code (Wikipedia (a), 2007). This is the same technology that is used by Web browsers to display content in web pages instead of the HTML code used to create the content (Wikipedia (b), 2007). This makes the design and production process much faster than it used to be.

Also see HTML for Dummies

But

One of the problems that has been associated with the dominance of WYSIWYG technology is that it has led to a great deal of design mediocrity both in print and on the web. This is partly because the technology undermines the value of having distinct roles as writers, editors, designers and programmers/compositors. In the era of DTP, we see more writers and editors making layout decisions simply because they can, rather than because they know what they are doing. Worse yet, they may not even realize that they are making design decisions when they pick out fonts, hyphenate, justify or kern the type.

This is especially true in web design where novices often interact directly with the rendered layout rather than with the HTML code. In fact, many companies have made a small fortune by creating tools that make web designer easier for people who have not or cannot be bothered to learn the basics. Some of these tools include RealMac? software’s RapidWeaver? and Apple’s new iWeb packages. Also, What You See is not always accurate, causing you to “fix” elements of the text or design that are not actually “broken”(Conrad, 1996).

For web designers, the WYSIWYG HTML editor did not deliver the same level of control over how the elements are meant to be displayed in a browser as it did in DTP because web browsers often displayed the content based on the screen-size and fonts available on the end-user’s computer (Maxwell, 2007*). While browsers have become more consistent over time, John Maxwell points out that this evolutionary convergence is a direct response to market pressures making the web more and more like desktop publishing (Maxwell, 2007*).

Have we outgrown the technology?

In DTP, the technology is not going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, it has only gotten stronger with more sophisticated professional programs such as Adobe’s InDesign and Quark’s XPress packages. The technology has devalued the authority of the designer in the market and more or less eroded the need for a compositor in the production process.

The Web, on the other hand is a different case. The WYSIWYG HTML editor is largely a relic of Web 1.0. It was most useful in the days when it was enough to simply put text on a web page. Today, web users expect not only different forms of content (audio, video) but also expect a great deal of interactivity with the elements on a web page. Web architecture is also more sophisticated today, with wiki and CMS technologies, which are more capable platforms for blogging, podcasting, videocasting and the creation of social networking sites than the web tools of old.

Lastly, new web standards have also led to a separation between web elements and element styling. With CSS, a web designer can define the layout of a webpage with more control and consistency than was previously possible in a WYSIWYG HTML editor. Ironically, this has emerged with the “return” of mark up language, which was initially one of the technologies that lost out to the WYSIWYG back in the early days of DTP.

That said, claims that the WYSIWYG HTML editor is dead are greatly exaggerated. In the world of amateur desktop publishing and web design, the tools are still very much in use. Professionally, Dreamweaver is still alive and well, having survived because it has been adapted to emerging web design trends such as the use of CSS.

Bottom line: Print designers are captives of the WYSIWYG technology and will continue their “love-and-hate” relationship it—loving the way it simplifies their production process and hating the way it devalues their authority, all the while knowing that they cannot do without it. Web designers, on the other hand, can opt out of its use, provided that they are willing to compromise on the weaknesses of the blogging engines, Wiki and CMS platforms available today.

But that is another story.

References:

Taylor, Conrad. “What has WYSIWYG done to Us?” The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems 26.2 September 30, 1996. Retrieved April 19, 2007 from http://www.ideography.co.uk/library/seybold/WYSIWYG.html

Wikipedia (a), 2007 “WYSIWYG” Retrieved April 19, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wysiwyg

Wikipedia (b), 2007. “HTML editor” Retrieved April 19, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_editor#Criticism_on_WYSIWYG_editors

O’Reilly, Tim. “What Is Web 2.0 : Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software”. September 30, 2005. Retrieved April 19, 2007 from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

*Comments made by John Maxwell (instructor) on a previous version of this essay.

WYSIAYG --jmax, Mon, 05 Feb 2007 23:13:28 -0800 reply

..."What You See Is All You Get"

The notion of WYSIWYG editing comes out of Xerox PARC, where personal computing was first developed. The original idea was that all sorts of computational objects should have straightforward onscreen representations that could be Manipulated Directly, as opposed to having editing vs. display modes. The result was that You could literally See exactly What You Get.

The term matured in the era of Desktop Publishing (DTP), when WYSIWYG came to mean that what you saw onscreen was the same as what you would get out of the printer. Tools like Illustrator and Pagemaker gave the user almost direct control over PostScript?, so that there would be no surprises with the printed output.

The web, however, ushered in a new era of abstraction. The very premise of SGML-based markup languages—such as HTML—is that they pertain to the semantic structure of the content, and not its formatting. An HTML file, in its simplest conception, is a set of instructions for how the browser might render the page at the other end, subject to various unknown constraints: screen size, software version, available fonts, etc. etc.

Seen thus, the very idea of WYSIWYG HTML editors is sort of ass-backwards, because there is no reliable reference point (as there was with PostScript?). The only "What You Get" is what one particular browser might display (as opposed to another browser, potentially). In practice, things have been getting more and more consistent over time, so that browsers are more predictable, and as a result, 'WYSIWYG' editors can be made to show something more or less like a generic browser target. But, bear in mind, that this evolutionary convergence is a direct response to market pressures making the web more and more like DTP.

The real threat to the very idea of WYSIWYG editors is the emergence of web applications and platforms: blogs, wikis, CMS, etc., in which the display of a page is a construction based on site-wide templates, end-user display preferences, and authored content components. Hence, one writes a blog entry, which fits into the larger site templating structure, rather than designing a blog page unto itself. The content becomes, in a sense, independent of its formatting—something underscored by the volumes of RSS content floating around (that is, content completely stripped out of its presentational and HTML-based contexts.