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First off, WYSIWYG HTML editors exist and have existed for years. The author is glossing over the biggest issue. Nobody writes web pages like they use word. No
by __david__ 12y ago
First off, WYSIWYG HTML editors exist and have existed for years.
The author is glossing over the biggest issue. Nobody writes web pages like they use word. Nobody just types up an html page from <html> to </html> and then moves on to the next page—WYSIWYG editors would be great at that.
The author mentions "static site generators", and that is the crux of the issue. Nowadays HTML is usually built by templates, sometimes even transpiled from something else entirely (HAML, etc). There's still markup but it's surrounded by template directives which can be fairly complicated turing complete languages in and of themselves (Template::Toolkit and HAML both will let you drop down to the parent language if you need to).
Even if there were some sort of nice, usable, visual programming language, WYSIWYG would still be problematic since you would have to show the loops and conditionals and such superimposed with the HTML (otherwise how can you edit something that isn't shown) and as soon as you see the structure of it all, it isn't WYSIWYG any more (by definition).
The fact is, we in the hacker culture don't embrace WYSIWYG and hang on to our terminals because we're stubborn old codgers, it's just that we've experienced both and we know which one is better.
- jules 12y agoI think the author is rather talking about <textarea> vs rich text editor widgets for user supplied content, and not really about things like Dreamweaver.
- Joeboy 12y agoTen years ago I worked for a web dev company that embraced rich text editor widgets for user supplied content. It was great. We charged them an arm and a leg for the ability to edit their content, then we charged them more to fix it when they broke it or couldn't do what they wanted, which was always. Subsequently, when I'm doing websites for myself or for people who I like, I don't use rich text editor widgets. It's possible I'm stuck in the past, but it's not an ideological issue.
- jules 12y agoI have the opposite experience. Clients love WYSIWYG for two reasons: 1. They don't need to train their data entry employees in markdown or similar. 2. They can copy paste rich text from MS Word, rather than having to pay somebody to transliterate it into markdown. The number of support requests for WYSIWYG is vastly lower than for markdown.
- DanBC 12y agoYou haven't addressed the main flaw of WYSIWYG HTML editing which is that what you see is not what I get. There are so many things that can change what I see. Which is kind of the point of HTML - you don't know what browser I use, or OS, or screen size, or if I even have a screen. I accept your point that WYSIWYG could be powerful for website creation, but web-searching for the <meta name="generator" content="$FOO"> for the various WYSIWYG tools doesn't return good examples.