Talk:WYSIWYG

Initial sentence
I love the fact that the initial sentence here, before i changed it, misquoted its source, and gave the (oops, my bias is showing) Microsoft definition of wysiwyg, or wysinnifacnwyg: what you see is not necessarily, in fact almost certainly not what you get. wysiwyg means the finished product is exactly, precisely, what you see in an onscreen preview. anything short of this cant be called wysiwyg, and if its hard to implement, the software developer doesnt get to move the bar. see Close enough for government work as a corollary term.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 23:55, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Why?
There is no mention in the article of the why; why wysiwyg was developed, what it is best used for and why. The answer is to avoid exclusivity, i.e. for a web page to be editable by as many people as possible, not just people who know html. Inviting the public to edit internet content and then expecting them to know html is counter productive to the stated aim of inclusiveness, and is disciminatory. Oh wait, that's what Wikipedia does! The truth is that Wikipedia itself with its non-wysiwyg editor is exclusive to a certain type of person with certain skills; everyone else is excluded. Why am I not typing this in a wsyiwig? Will my edit even work? Where will this "new section" appear in the page i am now editing? I don't know. The preview button doesn't show me. What if I want to add a picture? "Oh it looks complicated, don't think I'll bother" or "I don't want to muck up the page" is what people think when they choose not to add relevant content to publicly editable pages. I doubt more than one person in one hundred with applicable knowledge on a subject would edit a non-wysiwyg wiki or web page. ```` — Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.241.100.51 (talk) 14:12, 21 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Known problem, see this week released Signpost (our own internal newspaper) here. There are also some new editors in development. mabdul 21:41, 7 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Perhaps the picture may help to illustrate drawbacks of non-wysisyg approaches. Jochen Burghardt (talk) 17:42, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

I concur with the preceeding comment about exclusivity. Right now, I don't know what I'm doing: whether I am editing the correct part of the page and how what I am typing will appear. I remember complaining about wikipedia not using a wysiwyg way back in '04. Since then I have decided not to bother editing wikipedia approximately several thousand times. Wikipedia is dominated by computer nerds who in my opinion enjoy their exclusive access and wikipedia's content reflects their shared world view. Members of the public should not need to learn html or any other code/tag/language in order to participate in the wikipedia project. This is also the primary reason why I will not give one cent to wikipedia. 101.184.70.188 (talk) 00:36, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
 * This original research is wrong. "a web page to be editable by as many people as possible"… wisywig is way older than the web.  Oh, and Wikipedia never used HTML, it always had its own, much simpler markup language.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jae (talk • contribs) 11:51, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

Etymology
The phrase "what you see is what you get" was coined in 1982 by Larry Sinclair This is just wrong. As noted in another point in the same section, it was a popular catchphrase of the 1960s, via Flip Wilson. Presumably the acronym was coined after the phrase was, but it can't be as late as 1982, if there was really a newsletter titled WYSIWYG in the late 1970s. Joule36e5 (talk) 23:45, 23 July 2013 (UTC) Also, in the previous section, there's a reference to a 1981 ad which uses the phrase. sweecoo (talk) 23:37, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

The current revision says "Seybold and the researchers at PARC were simply ...", which is a dangling reference to some deleted text; Seybold is not currently mentioned anywhere else in the article. The text "The first conference on the topic was organized by Jonathan Seybold ..." was removed as part of the edit of 10:28, 7 February 2009 by JulesH. Joule36e5 (talk) 23:50, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

What You See is All You've Got
Back in the '80s, when WYSIWYG editors were more primitive, hadn't yet supported "formats", and encouraged people to directly manipulate the styling of individual words, proponents of document formatting systems used to deride them as "What You See is All You've Got" -- emphasizing that, unlike with document formatting programs, there was no underlying structure in the document and so no easy way to make consistent changes in presentation. I first heard it from Brian Reid (inventor of Scribe) at Stanford in 1982, and he may well have coined the term, although I see it attributed in print (later) to Brian Kernighan. Evank (talk) 16:37, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

The second hatnote
I personally don't think the second hatnote should be there, for two reasons: I didn't just take it out because I'd like to get some feedback first. Eman 235 / talk 05:39, 24 September 2014 (UTC)
 * 1) VisualEditor is not WYSIWYG, it's WYSIAWYG.
 * 2) How many people are actually going to look this up trying to find VisualEditor?

PDFs are a good example
I believe PDFs are a perfect example of WYSIWYG, kind of their very purpose. I will add this somewhere soon.12think (talk) 13:15, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Some Office suites are great at WYSIWYG, such as between differing devices, operating systems, applications, when on the web and also when printed
The article suggests that office suites are bad at it, this is inaccurate as some are very good at it. Due to the above, people have varying expectations of WYSIWYG in office suites, can we clarify this in the article? 12think (talk) 00:57, 20 February 2022 (UTC)12think (talk) 01:13, 9 January 2022 (UTC)12think (talk) 13:15, 2 January 2022 (UTC)
 * I removed a sentence that said WYSIWYG is not about printed output, this is a consideration for many.
 * Some office suite vendors state they have great at all round WYSIWYG, presumably as a contrasting selling point to other products, their users have a good understanding of how WYSIWYG applies to office suites, a differing viewpoint to many perhaps.
 * Microsoft Office sucks at WYSIWYG, probably intentionally for vendor lock-in reasons, leading to PDFs (Portable Document Format) being supported by default on just about every device type in the world for the last couple of decades.
 * Microsoft competitors struggle with Microsoft's proprietary file formats, even Microsoft often displays their own documents differently between different Office versions.
 * Microsoft's newer OOXML "transitional" file formats are an unnecessarily "interim" complex specification impeding file interoperability (plus restrictive font licensing, etc, although unrelated here).
 * OOXML "strict" (i.e. the standard), is the standard that Microsoft claimed would be used with Office 2010 onwards, they said this when the OOXML specification was ratified in 2007, but is still not the default even in Office 2021, nor the online version.
 * I believe all web based office suites print via PDF, Microsoft stated in 2021 on their website that their printed output is not the same as on screen, this was in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/office-online-service-description/word-online#print-to-pdf this paragraph has since been edited and a link has been added called "printing a document in Word for the web", this is a broken link unfortunately.
 * Basic: An application is WYSIWYG where the document layout does not change when viewing, editing or printing on the same device.
 * Better: The above, also with "differing printer devices".
 * More useful: All of the above, also with differing operating systems.
 * Ideal: All of the above, when used from multiple office suite applications from competing vendors, citing the success of the world wide web (HTML standards).