Posted by Richard Formby on 03/12/07 11:05

Travis Newbury wrote
> On Mar 11, 8:46 pm, "nice.guy.nige" <nigel_m...@deadspam.com> wrote:
>> web editor is probably better described as "WYSIWYMGIYAVVL" (What You See
>> Is
>> What You Might Get If You Are Very Very Lucky)
>
> I completely disagree.

I completely disagree ;-)

> The exception is when it does not appear the
> way you wanted it to.

Which will happen just about all the time.

Each browser has (sort of) and each "WYSIWYG" editor has a different
rendering engine, with the exemplatory example being the combination of
Frontpage and IE, which have many differently behaving engines with many and
varied different bugs over their different incarnations.

You should never expect version x of editor y to look the same in version i
of browser j. Won't happen.

> If what you say is true, and it only works if
> you are "very lucky", then no one would use them.

Sheep?

> I would agree with
> the statement,
> WYSIWYGBIPWV (What You See Is What You Get But It Probably Won't
> Validate)

I don't think validation comes into it, except that "WYSIWYG" editors are
notorious for producing invalid code, HTML, CSS and Javascript. Clean it up
and it will still be different.

WYSIWYG applies to things like word , or even wordpad. A single program that
*can* display stuff *exactly* as *it* is going to print it. The term does
not apply to application A passing some significantly complex data to
application Z, or X, or Y, and expecting the latter to display it the same.

I prefer the much shorter term for these editors: WYSIC[rap].

--
Richard.

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