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I was reading an old Lifehacker article titled, "Five Best WYSIWYG HTML Editors", and it got me thinking.

It seems to me that the phrase WYSIWYG editor that can also directly edit HTML is a contradiction. "WYSIWYG" means, as most of you probably know, "What You See Is What You Get". But direct HTML editing is, by definition, actually WYSIWYM ("What You See Is What You Mean").

So how can something that has both WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM functionality be both WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM software. Just because I talk like a Human and have social skills like a Lego person doesn't mean I'm both a Human and a Lego person.

Or are the terms not black-and-white like it's so often described?

2 Answers2

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WYSIWYG HTML editors output HTML, but the editing of the document is WYSIWYG. Its no different than editing a document in Microsoft Word and saving as HTML. You arent editing in HTML, but the output is HTML.

Keltari
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  • Wouldn't that be indirect HTML editing? I mean, technically, you're creating HTML even in pure WYSIWYG software; you're just not seeing it. I thought direct HTML editing meant you can type `

    The dog was red.

    ` and when you saved it as the final document, it would show it post-processing, i.e. with the text, *The dog was red.* aligned right with no tags visible. Is this incorrect?     –  Jun 05 '15 at 02:39
  • Thats the whole point. It allows you to create a HTML document without knowing HTML – Keltari Jun 05 '15 at 02:40
  • I know that. But that's what a WYSIWYG editor is for. But above I was talking about *WYSIWYG editors that can directly* (as opposed to indirectly) *edit HTML*. If you need to directly edit HTML, that means you know **some** HTML. –  Jun 05 '15 at 02:42
  • You seem to have a disconnect here. Those editors allow you to edit HTML directly if you know how, or use tools if you dont. – Keltari Jun 05 '15 at 04:13
  • Seems to me than that they should be called something more along the lines of *WYSOMIWYG*: "What You See Or Mean Is What You Get", respectively, which conveys the fact that it's neither full WYSIWYG or full WYSIWYM but gives you the option to use either to some extent whenever you so desire. –  Jun 05 '15 at 07:19
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CKeditor will clear up the disconnect here (plus their forum is great).
You may have become confused because of other markup and the way Microsoft Expressions used to have different view modes.

slhck
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ClaireW
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