If I see a gap between two lines of text, and that gap vanishes when I commit the document to the web or save it to a file, then it’s not ‘WYSIWYG’. But this has been my experience with 100% of such editors.
I propose a new acronym to replace ‘wizzy-wig’:
WYSMBWYGIYLBIACWBFRTWNBMCTYSSIYUC
What You See Might Be What You Get if You’re Lucky but it Almost Certainly Won’t Be For Reasons That Will Never Be Made Clear to You So Suck it Ya Ugly Cunt
Not as pithy, but at least it’s accurate.
Pre-Adobe Dreamweaver.
Yes but the html it generated was a monstrosity. If you wanted to edit it again, you better use dreamweaver.
It definitely did not generate clean html lol but it was wysiwyg
Macromedia. They ran the Internet for a hot minute.
Shockwave, Flash, Dreamweaver, Coldfusion. My how things change.
I still have my copy of Macromedia Flash 5. Adobe destroyed it, so I made sure to keep my install package.
I’m oddly envious 😄 Then I realize I’d have nothing to do with the output and just get little sad.
I still make stuff with it occasionally, but it’s now limited (due to the aged tech) to linear video clips. Still fun, though.
Personally I feel like they’re generally pretty good at WYSIWYG. What they’re bad at is WYSIWYW (What You See Is What You Want).
After I do a bunch of work in Word and I have a bunch of garbage, when I load that file back I still have the same garbage. If I print it, I get the same garbage. So yeah, I get what I see.
Is that what I want? No, I want not-garbage.
Anyone remember WordPerfect coming out with “reveal codes” and allowing you to basically edit the markup and fix the issues?
Word was never good with layout. Move one picture or text block on a page for just a tenth of a mm, and it can easily fuck up the whole page layout.
Exactly. You never get what you want, but you certainly get whatever crap you see.
PDF is the only format I know of that is truly WYSIWYG, as it’s intended for print output. But, even with that, you need to know what you’re doing, it’s possible to fuck it up.
I wouldn’t go as far as to call PDF a dumpster fire, but I can tell you that internally it is an absolute unholy mess internally. The fact that you feel like you get consistency out of it 100% comes down to the anal retentive developers who spend insane man hours tweaking the fuck out of their code to get whatever PDF library that they got stuck using from fucking up the image.
The worst part is that Adobe wants PDF to be the one and only format, but also wants to make sure that you have to use their very expensive PDF library to integrate it into your program. So, they constantly fuck with stuff and make changes that break shit. To make it even dumber, their own library doesn’t always keep up with their changes, and when you report the bugs they created, they give no fucks about ever fixing the issue unless you are big enough to for them to care.God fuck PDF.
I’ve hated it from the start in what, 1990-ish?
I generally dislike self-censorship & other compliance in advance with authoritarianism, but people calling pædophiles “PDF files” is great as an insult to the format. Donald Trump is a PDF file, and I mean that as an insult to PDF files!
I would absolutely call it a dumpster fire. An absolute hell of a format to work with.
Unless the fonts are not embedded and you don’t have the right fonts installed
Eeeeh, no. PDFs will show differently based on the software as soon as it gets a little complex. The only truly reliable PDFs are PDFs that contain… Images.
After a while I realized that Word (the web app) does not render lines of text in the same position as Word (the desktop app), in the very same file. The former seems to use a pseudo random line spacing.
That sounds like something Microsoft would do. They love inconsistencies.
They probably have a whole team of people ensuring that nothing is consistent.
That’s why I refuse to use them. Just use markdown or latex if you want to get fancy with it.
These 2 formats literally do not control how you see the content
Gimme that WYSIWYM, LyX.
I’ve just realised I haven’t used anything like that in 20 years. Macromedia Dreamweaver, those were the days!
It sounds like you are only talking about html.
Delphi VB6 C# Winforms Qt
These wysiwyg editors usually worked/work without issues.
I’ve made a few apps with wxFormbuilder and they were wysiwyg.
WDTANMB
Shame you never had the misfortune of having to use NetObjects Fusion. Tables nested like an oversized fractal matryoshka doll.
there was a good HTML editor back in the day called homesite, I made a very popular counterstrike site with it
Try VisualEditor on e.g. Wikipedia. You notice idiosynchrasies if you’re doing something specific or are pretty experienced, but overall, the difference between the editor and the preview (fully rendered page) is trivial unless you’re messing around with a few specific elements (even then, a quick ‘Preview’ fills in this gap).
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WYSIMOLWIG was coined decades ago.
Was it?
It’s been mentioned in the hacker file for at least 30 years, see https://home.nvg.org/~venaas/jargon/jargon_37.html#TAG2012
