QUESTION: What does WYSIWYG mean?
ANSWER: Pronounced
"WIZ ee wig," WYSIWYG stands for "What You See Is What You Get."
It is an acronym that's used in the electronic-publishing community
to refer to document-creation systems (such as page-layout software and
illustration software) that allow
a user to interact with something on the computer screen that
looks a lot like the document will look in its final form.
Some examples of document-creation systems that qualify as WYSIWYG systems
are Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, and QuarkXpress. These systems can
rightfully be called WYSIWYG systems because, when you're using
one of these systems, the on-screen representation
of the document that is displayed by the system
looks very much like your document will look when it is
finished and rendered on the intended media. For example, if you're using the
Times-Roman font for your text, the shapes of the characters on the
screen look very much like the shapes of the characters that are rendered in
Times-Roman on your finished document;
and those characters are positioned on the on-screen document in much the
same way that they'll be positioned on the finished document (relatively speaking).
And if you create a red circle on your document, the red circle will be displayed
on your screen in approximately the same color that will be used on your finished
document, at approximately the same size and in approximately the same place
(relatively speaking) where it will appear in your finished document.
(Note that we carefully avoided using the word "paper" in the preceding
paragraph when referring to finished documents. That's because
many documents are not printed on paper these days. That is: some documents (such as this Web page)
are created for on-line use
only, and some are printed on things other than paper, such as tee shirts, CDs,
billboards,
and sides of buses!)
If you're under 45 years of age (or so), you might have felt a little puzzled
when you were reading the first couple of paragraphs above, because —
unless you're a Web designer or a computer programmer that specializes
in electronic-publishing technology, or unless you've had some experience
with "old-fashioned" electronic typesetting systems —
you might never have seen or used a document-creation
system that does not operate in WYSIWYG fashion!
To get an idea of how a "non-WYSIWYG" document-creation system works,
take a look at this:
If you're under 45 years of age (or so), you might have felt a little puzzled
when you were reading the explanation above, because —
unless you're a Web designer or a computer programmer that specializes
in electronic-publishing technology, or unless you've had some experience
with "old-fashioned" electronic typesetting systems —
you might never have seen or used a document-creation
system that does <b>not</b> operate in WYSIWYG fashion!<br>
<br>
To get an idea of how a "non-WYSIWYG" document-creation system works,
take a look at this:
As you can see, the text above contains some letters, numbers, and punctuation
marks that are used to control the formatting of the text but don't have semantic
value within the content. These special letters, numbers, and punctuation marks
are referred to as "tags" and "markup characters."
To render the text as intended, a special computer program, or "interpreter,"
is needed. When a file that contains text with embedded tags and markup characters is
processed by the proper interpreter, the text will be rendered (i.e., displayed or printed)
with the specified formatting.
There are many different markup languages for formatting text. One markup
language that is widely used is HyperText Markup Language, or HTML. HTML is the
markup language that is used on most Web sites to lay out text and graphics on Web pages,
such as the Web page that you are reading now. Your Web browser has an interpreter that
acts on the tags and markup characters in HTML pages and renders the resulting formatted
text and graphics on your screen.
If you
are a Web developer that does not use a WYSIWYG HTML editor, you know that the tags
and formatting characters in the
example above are part of the HTML language. For example:
" represents the double-quote character: "
<b> and </b> surround
text that is to be rendered in bold, and
<br> causes a line break.
And you know that line breaks within the HTML text are ignored when the text is rendered by an HTML interpreter.
When you use your non-WYSIWYG HTML editor, you actually
type the characters that make up the tags and markup characters at the same time that you
type your text (or perhaps your HTML editor provides some macros that cut down on your typing
by entering some of the characters for you).
In contrast, if you are a Web developer that uses a WYSIWYG HTML editor (such as Dreamweaver),
then you're probably not accustomed to dealing with tags and markup characters. Instead,
your HTML-editing software probably lets you highlight text and assign font attributes to
it, it probably lets you drag and drop graphics onto your pages, and it probably shows you
a Web page on your screen that looks almost exactly like the Web page will look when it is
displayed in a Web browser.
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