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Ah, the irony of WYSIWYG. It stands for "What You See Is What You Get," and ironically that is rarely the case.

There are two general types of editors for web pages. First, there's the code editor. With a code editor you can customize the HTML code of a web page by re-programming the web page. However, this requires you to know programming languages such as HTML. Realizing that not everyone wants to learn to program just to set up a basic website, companies then produced WYSIWYG (pronounced "Wizzy-wig") editors. These programs were intended to look and feel like a stripped down version of Microsoft Word. So if you wanted something to be bold: you would just highlight it and click a button that made that text bold, just like in Word. And like Word, the text would appear to be bold on your screen as well. Underneath all of this, the appropriate HTML code was being generated for your page.

This sounds like a great idea. Now you can build web pages without needing to know how to program!

The problem is that these editors may not use standardized HTML to build your web page. As a result, your page may look great in Internet Explorer; but if you were to open it in another web browser like the very popular Firefox browser, it may look like a jumble of words. Why? Because the editor used a special subset of code only Internet Explorer supports and is not part of the HTML standards. As a result, other web browsers cannot interpret this properly. So what you see is not really what you get.

Not all WYSIWYG editors are evil in letting your web pages only work on one specific web browser. There are many standards-compliant (meaning they use only the stuff in the HTML standard so all web browsers can interpret it properly) WYSIWYG editors in existence. However, these editors too may have a flaw: inability to properly delete the correct code.

For lack of a better explanation, sometimes these editors can get confused when you get to delete something: what code should it delete? After all, all you are doing is interacting with an interface, under which actual HTML code is being created, modified and removed. This can lead to incredibly frustrating circumstances where you press backspace, and suddenly the writing is gigantic or you try to delete one letter and a completely random picture disappears from the page.

Again, what you see is not what you're getting. This time within the editor itself rather than the web browser.

Though there are modern WYSIWYG editors that overcome all of these obstacles. They have an editor that uses standard HTML code. The editor itself doesn't manipulate incorrect code. Sure, the page is not as efficient as if you coded it yourself, but overall it still works.

However, the problem is with the web browsers again. Since every web browser works differently, each will display your page slightly differently. Some browsers even allow users to install plug-ins that alter the way a page looks. So while what you see may be what YOU get, it may not be what someone else gets. Granted, recent web standards have improved the consistency of web page appearances across web browsers - but it is still far from being identical.

It's ironic that something designed to make things easy (WYSIWYG editors) has turned into an absurdly complicated and frustrating solution. Sometimes it makes you want to give up and learn to code things by hand. It's a lot less frustrating that way sometimes.

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