computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, e ...

, What You See Is What You Mean (WYSIWYM, ) is a

paradigm In science and philosophy, a paradigm () is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitute legitimate contributions to a field. Etymology ''Paradigm'' comes f ...

for editing a

structured document A structured document is an electronic document where some method of markup is used to identify the whole and parts of the document as having various meanings beyond their formatting. For example, a structured document might identify a certain por ...

. It is an adjunct to the better-known

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

(What You See Is What You Get) paradigm, which displays the result of a formatted document as it will appear on screen or in print—without showing the descriptive code underneath. In a WYSIWYM editor, the user writes the contents in a structured way, marking the content according to its meaning, its significance in the document, and leaves its final appearance up to one or more separate style sheets. In essence, it aims to accurately display the contents being conveyed, rather than the actual formatting associated with it. For example, in a WYSIWYM document, one would manually mark text as the title of the document, the name of a section, the caption associated with a figure, or the name of an author; this would in turn allow one element, such as section headings, to be rendered as large bold text in one style sheet, or as red center justified text in another, without further manual intervention. More often than not, this requires the

semantic Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...

structure of the document to be decided in advance before writing it. The editor also needs a system for exporting structured content to generate the document's final format, following the indicated structure. The main advantage of this system is the total

separation of content and presentation Separation of content and presentation (or separation of content and style) is the separation of concerns design principle as applied to the authoring and presentation of content. Under this principle, visual and design aspects (presentation and s ...

: users can structure and write the document once, rather than repeatedly alternating between the two modes of presentation—an approach which comes with its own switch cost. And since the rendering of formatting is left to the export system, this also makes it easier to achieve consistency in design as well.

Document processors

Unlike an unstructured, fixed-presentation document, a

document processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current ...

rather than a

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Word processor (electronic device), Early word processors were stand-alone devices ded ...

must be used for WYSIWYM. The first document processor which articulated itself through the WYSIWYM term was

LyX LyX (styled as ; pronounced ) (Based on 3 developers, they say it can be pronounced "Licks", "Lucks" and "Leeks") is an open source, graphical user interface document processor based on the LaTeX typesetting system. Unlike most word processors, ...

document processor, although similar concepts can be traced back to earlier publishing systems such as

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...

, TPS (modeled on pioneering experiments at

Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...

) and—probably the most popular one—

FrameMaker Adobe FrameMaker is a document processor designed for writing and editing large or complex documents, including structured documents. It was originally developed by Frame Technology Corporation, which was bought by Adobe. Overview FrameMaker ...

. For example, in FrameMaker, a document may be authored (i.e., viewed and edited) using two possible page views, the styling tags (called "formats") and contents of a document reside in "body pages", while structure and presentation are defined by "master pages". Multiple such documents can be linked together and programmed conditionally for a variety of applications. These elements can then be exported to corresponding tags which preserve some or all of their functionality in a

markup language Markup language refers to a text-encoding system consisting of a set of symbols inserted in a text document to control its structure, formatting, or the relationship between its parts. Markup is often used to control the display of the document ...

such as

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

and

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

, or directly rendered down for final presentation in anything from

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

to raw text. A different approach to the WYSIWYM philosophy is taken by

GNU TeXmacs GNU TeXmacs is a scientific word processor and typesetting component of the GNU Project. It originated as GNU Emacs with TeX functionalities, though it shares no code with those programs, while using TeX fonts. It is written and maintained by Jori ...

, which combines the on-screen representation of the document structure with an almost-faithful WYSIWYG rendering.

In web environments

Major software vendors have integrated web-page creation features into their popular

products to increase their utility. Users can create an

web page in a word processor with no knowledge of HTML, but like nearly all IDE authored or handwritten web markup, these tools' automated analysis of the source format rarely accounts for a distinction between HTML's content and its presentation through means such as CSS during output. Such fixed-presentation HTML generators have been criticized, primarily because of the bloatedness and low quality of their code, and there are voices advocating for changes to the WYSIWYM model. One example of a WYSIWYM Web page editor is

WYMeditor WYMeditor is an open-source WYSIWYM text editor written in the JavaScript programming language for editing content on web pages. It is based on the jQuery JavaScript framework. It differs from other embeddable text editors such as FCKeditor and ...

. In this editor, the structure of the documents is defined by the class attributes of HTML elements. These classes also allow the final appearance of the document to be applied. Although WYMeditor follows a WYSIWYM model, the document format is always HTML, so the new structures to be defined are limited to new classes, and the final document will always be built by applying presentational elements to these classes. Other CMSs are moving in the direction of providing some WYSIWYM interface for their users editing content. Tiki Wiki CMS/Groupware version 7.0 is one of them, by means of using

CodeMirror CodeMirror is a JavaScript component that provides a code editor in the browser. It has a rich programming API and a focus on extensibility. History The first version of the editor was written early 2007, for the console in the Eloquent Java ...

in-browser editing software.

Document processors

In web environments

See also