Comments on: Where WYSIWYG works

By: Bill Seitz

Bill Seitz — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 18:31:36 +0000

I’ve seen some cool interfaces where you’re editing just a paragraph/section of a web/wiki page. When you have a small chunk like that, switching between (the less horrible flavors of) wikitext/markdown and HTML is much less of an issue.

By: alextp

alextp — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 17:08:45 +0000

Not liking WYSIWYG has more to do with separating content from presentation than with any other issue.
But, true, when you do want to edit the presentation, WYSIWYG is fundamental - only many times you don’t necessarily care, and being able to leave it for later is good.

By: beza1e1

beza1e1 — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 16:57:30 +0000

The problem is even with an embedded WYSIWYG editor it isn’t WYSIWYG.

Do you use a WYSIWYG editor to write your blog entries in Wordpress? If yes, don’t you need the Preview nevertheless? I do with my serendipity blog.

The reason is, it is “WYSIWYG in plain HTML”, but when published a bunch of CSS is applied and some things are added (”Posted by …”). Additionally a blog post is not only read on the website, but through Feedreaders as well, which apply their own Stylesheets.

A Wiki is perhaps not that “multi-published”, but every web2.0-self-respecting wiki has feeds.

By: Reuben

Reuben — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 00:15:19 +0000

Jeff, I’m sort of confused by your point about muscle memory. You’re complaining that the ‘normal’ key commands don’t work, and instead you have to learn Control-B and Control-I, which you say is extra work.

Yet you then go on to praise textile and markdown and their ilk, but at some point you must have had to learn all the formatting commands that work with those tools. I don’t think you can realistically make the argument that encasing text in asterisks to signify Bold (or whatever the case may be) can be considered “normal key commands”.

Perhaps I totally misunderstood what you were trying to say. If so, I apologize.

By: Abe

Abe — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 14:50:40 +0000

Jeff, I agree that there are plenty of bad WYSIWYG editors out there.

I use a Mac, and I’d be annoyed too if the standard Cmd keys didn’t work. Fortunately, they work just fine in the Dojo editor.

In the JotSpot wiki we’re currently not exposing the ability to set custom fonts and sizes in our WYSIWYG editor. Even if we do in the future, we certainly aren’t going to allow people to pick an unreadably small font size :)