{"id":247,"date":"2008-08-12T08:07:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-12T08:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/?p=247"},"modified":"2015-01-14T18:35:28","modified_gmt":"2015-01-14T18:35:28","slug":"wysiwyg-rant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/?p=247","title":{"rendered":"WYSIWYG Rant"},"content":{"rendered":"

<rant><\/span>
How come a web-based XML editor can call itself a “WYSIWYG editor”? WYSIWYG, per definition, stands for What You See Is What You get<\/span>, but that’s just madness in this context, for several reasons:<\/p>\n

First of all, XML is supposed to be about semantics<\/span> and structure<\/span>, not about contents<\/span> and presentation<\/span>. The idea is that you present your XML according to your media. On paper, a certain layout is desired, with page numbers, page references, and so on. Online, you need hyperlinks, sans serif fonts, and so on. On a mobile phone’s two-inch screen, you need to break down yur information to short chunks with short titles and captins. And so on.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, different web browsers will display a web page differently. A page displayed using Internet Explorer<\/span> will not be identical to the the same page in Firefox<\/span>. Sure, they are close these days, but not the same.<\/p>\n

And finally, when displaying XML in something other than a pure text editor, you apply a stylesheet of some kind. CSS is common; XMetaL<\/span> uses it, as does Oxygen<\/span>. Web-based XML editors often use a combination of XSLT and CSS, so two<\/span> stylesheets, not one.<\/p>\n

Isn’t this the exact opposite of WYSIWYG? You get further away from what XML actually looks like while not getting closer to the published result.<\/p>\n

WYSIWYG, in the context of XML and structured documentation, is in my humble opinion a marketing ploy by companies that seem to have little else to offer.
<\/rant><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<rant>How come a web-based XML editor can call itself a “WYSIWYG editor”? WYSIWYG, per definition, stands for What You See Is What You get, but that’s just madness in this context, for several reasons: First of all, XML is supposed to be about semantics and structure, not about contents and presentation. The idea is that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[178,179,145,136],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sgmlguru.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}