WYSIWYG vs. WYSIWYM and semantic usage?

   Hi!

The way of the future of information seems to be semantic markup,  
both when speaking of the web and when speaking of word processing.  
That is marking up content according to what it is rather than what  
it should look like. When speaking of word processing there seem to  
be two approaches to this, the ordinary WYSIWYG (What You See Is What  
You Get) approach which ordinary word processors have, and the pure  
semantic approach aka. WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean).

WYSIWYG:s usually offer a possibility to mark up content with style  
classes rather than directly saying how each letter, word or passage  
should look. (Kind of like using CSS classes instead of in-line CSS  
or FONT-tags.) If you choose to use this possibility explicitly one  
could say that you're marking up text semantically (as long as the  
names of the classes are of a semantic nature). Then there's also at  
least one purely semantic word processor called LyX, which is a  
frontend to LaTeX. LyX has a so called WYSIWYM (What You See Is What  
You Mean) approach, which means that it doesn't even allow the user  
to see the formatting of the text while typing, encouraging the user  
to think semantically.

When speaking of web content the Bitflux Editor embraces this  
approach as a WYSIWYG, yet encouraging the user to use semantic  
markup more than any other WYSIWYG I've seen.
My question is: What advantages and disadvantages does this approach  
have compared to a pure WYSIWYM?

I think it may be an advantage for the user to have a feeling of what  
the content is going to look like already at the time of typing it.  
But on the other hand it may tempt the user into using inappropriate  
markup in trying to achieve a sertain look, which anyways should be  
up to the CSS-designer to decide (at least for the sake of  
consistency). Another problem occurs if one is going to reuse the  
conent in different medias with different formatting (ie. different  
styling for print), then the WYSIWYG is nothing but an illusion.

What experiances or thoughts do you have on this? Do you btw. have  
experiance with any web-based WYSIWYM:s?

   cheers, Simon
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