Talk:WYSIWYG

Computing Start‑class Mid‑importance

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Human–Computer Interaction (inactive)

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Archives

pre 2011

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

The second hatnote

I personally don't think the second hatnote should be there, for two reasons:

VisualEditor is not WYSIWYG, it's WYSIAWYG.
How many people are actually going to look this up trying to find VisualEditor?

I didn't just take it out because I'd like to get some feedback first. Eman235/talk 05:39, 24 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]