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)