Re: WYSIWYG vs. WYSIWYM and semantic usage?

Hi Simon

Sorry for not answering this earlier, but it's a pretty long post

IMHO it's just that our customers ask for WYSIWYG and not WYSIYWYM. They
mostly do not care about correct semantic usage, but with BXE you can at
least force it somehow :)

I know LyX and wrote my diploma thesis with it. It's great and very
useful, but I don't see much of a differecne between that and a strict
BXE. BXE shows what you mean in a manner that it will look like what you
will get on the webpage. if you reuse the content on a different palce
(PDA, PDF, whatever), it will of course look differently, but I think
the users can abstract that.

How would a WYSIWYM Editor look like in your opinion? On the web, I mean =
:)

chregu

On 21.11.2005 14:09 Uhr, Simon R=F6nnqvist wrote:
>   Hi!
>=20
> 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).
>=20
> WYSIWYG:s usually offer a possibility to mark up content with style=20
> classes rather than directly saying how each letter, word or passage=20
> 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.
>=20
> When speaking of web content the Bitflux Editor embraces this  approach
> as a WYSIWYG, yet encouraging the user to use semantic  markup more tha=
n
> any other WYSIWYG I've seen.
> My question is: What advantages and disadvantages does this approach=20
> have compared to a pure WYSIWYM?
>=20
> I think it may be an advantage for the user to have a feeling of what=20
> the content is going to look like already at the time of typing it.  Bu=
t
> on the other hand it may tempt the user into using inappropriate  marku=
p
> 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.
>=20
> What experiances or thoughts do you have on this? Do you btw. have=20
> experiance with any web-based WYSIWYM:s?
>=20
>   cheers, Simon

--=20
christian stocker | Bitflux GmbH | schoeneggstrasse 5 | ch-8004 zurich
phone +41 44 240 56 70 | mobile +41 76 561 88 60 | fax +41 1 240 56 71
http://www.bitflux.ch | [email protected] |  GPG 0x5CE1DECB
--=20
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