WYSIWYG:
What
You See Isn't Always What You Get
SolveYourProblem.com Article Series: Web Site Design
When you use a visual HTML editor like FrontPage
or Dreamweaver, they tell you that WYSIWYG: what you see is
what you get. This means that, in theory, what you see while
you're editing the page should look just like what you get
when you're done. While word processors have pretty much got
the concept working now when it comes to printing (it didn't
used to be as reliable), there are still problems when it comes
to HTML editors and web browsers of course, if you've spent
more than five minutes using visual HTML editors, then you'll
know that.
The Advantages of WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is quite uncontroversial at this point its advantages
are clear, in that it lets you make your page look exactly
the way you want it to while you're writing it, with no surprises.
In the early days, it was sometimes referred to as being like
a kind of 'interactive print preview'. Professional typesetters
were at first opposed to its use in publishing, but it's easy
and quick enough that it has come to dominate. The alternative
now, though, is to go back to the days of layout commands,
which isn't something most users want to do.
On the web, WYSIWY it can be far more problematic, because
what comes out of the other end of the program isn't a static,
printed page it's computer code, HTML, that has to be interpreted
by a web browser before it becomes anything viewable.
Not Even All Browsers are the Same
The first problem with what you see in an editor being what
you get in a browser is that all the different browsers available
don't always make the same page look the same way. How are
HTML editors supposed to account for bugs in Internet Explorer?
They can't, really.
Each piece of HTML editing software is forced to either write
its own HTML rendering engine (the engine that decides how
the code is translated to a visible page), or use one from
an existing program. Recently, for example, Dreamweaver moved
over to Opera's engine, which means that it shows pages the
way Opera does. FrontPage has always been closest to Internet
Explorer. Because Mozilla is open source, there are a lot of
HTML editors based on its engine, the most usable of which
is Nvu.
That doesn't exactly help, though, when it comes to things
looking the same in every browser if you use Dreamweaver,
for example, what you see will be what you get in Opera, but
not necessarily in Internet Explorer. This is a problem that
can be partially solved by testing everything in every browser,
but doing that doesn't let you see what your page is going
to look like as you're going along.
Maybe What You See Shouldn't Be What You Get
While users demand WYSIWYG software, it's somewhat misguided
when it comes to the web, for the simple reason that it expects
everyone to be using your site the same way, and designs towards
that expected use. In reality, the web was designed to be a
document format that was interpreted by the program receiving
it, meaning that if a browser wants to leave out all the graphics,
or ignore all your tables, then it's perfectly justified in
doing so. This is especially significant when it comes to mobile
browsers they simply don't have large enough screens to display
normal designs, and it's silly to force them to try.
Realizing this is one of the most important differences between
being a good designer and being a bad one. Bad designers will
be constantly nudging at their designs, doing everything they
can think of to get them to look exactly the way they intended
in every browser possible, even if it doubles the size and
complexity of the code. A good designer will write good code
that displays in all browsers, but doesn't necessarily have
to be pixel-perfect.
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SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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