WYSIWYG? Haaaah!
The fact that you're reading this online tells us you are evidently comfortable with the way computers have taken over the entire galaxy and a large part of your life as well. You're a willing convert, awed at the plethora of facts, functions and trivia brought to you by the wonderful www. And if you're anywhere near as tech-savvy as I am, you still don't know your html from your muesli.
Which is why we depend on these clever new programs that purport to magically convert text into web-friendly format without our having to fraternise with geekdom or fiddle with <html tags> and other strange phenomena. That's the upside. The downside, I've discovered, is that they're not exactly a gift from the gods.
They're called WYSIWYG editors, and I can just SEE them sitting in their plush corner cyberoffices, messing with my text, chewing it up and spitting it out. Or worse still, swallowing it whole, which is what happened when I was writing this, so I am now forced to regurgitate from memory. This could take anywhere from three to five centuries. Meanwhile, all the little gems in the original are now lost forever to that giant wordfill somewhere in cyberspace. That's right, the one already overflowing with all the stuff that people keyed straight into a WYSIWYG program, totally unaware that it would vaporize before they could hit 'save'.
WSYIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, and it rates right up there with the Bush administration, the WTO and the G8 for credibility and veracity. Because everybody knows that what you see is never what you get (and vice versa). There are various reasons, usually around four per person. These are mine:
i. The last time you 'got' something, it was the punch line from a joke someone told you 5 months ago
ii. Your failing eyesight is not to be trusted any longer; also, your sugar levels mess with your vision so you're seeing double anyway
iii. Your sharp new sunglasses are 3 shades darker than hell, so your day-vision now matches your night-vision
iv. It's all grown old and ugly and you really don't want to look anymore
Which brings us back to WYSIWYG (pronounced Wissiwig). What these web editing programs are meant to do is obviate the need for coding and html tags and such, so that if you can key text onto a keyboard, you can post text directly into templates on the web in a more sexy format than you previously could, thereby depriving millions of html geeks from feeding their families and vacationing in the Seychelles. Simple enough, right? Wrong.
First, you need to choose from stuff like editor-dhtml. jsp, editor-ekit.jsp, editor-wiki-js.jsp and so on. What's the difference between them, you ask? Who knows?! A bowtie, maybe?!? Whatever, you're naive and trusting enough to believe WYS will actually be WYG, so you laboriously key in around 500 words of text, checking for syntax, logic and flow as you progress...and when you hit 'post', it all vaporizes off your screen. Poof! Gone!
The Other Voice In Your Head asks: Did you save it as a draft first? Heck no, I was going to POST it, that works like a save, right? Or what's the POINT of a WYSIWYG editor?!? And how did I know the 'session' expires in 20 minutes so I automatically get logged out, and need to start over again?!? *&^%#$%^&*
Well, key it into WORD first, then copy it into the web template, says The Other Voice. Okay, let's try that. That's even worse, because the WYSIWYG program converts ALL punctuation, including hyphens, dashes and inverted commas, into instant hieroglyphics. Except you only see that when it's posted to the website; it never shows up that way on the 'new post' template OR the 'edit' template. To add insult to injury, it then either reduces the font size to microdot, or 72 point Garamond Bold. Take it or leave it.
As you can imagine, if you had say 500 words, with 5 lines of dialogue and a smattering of !!! and ???, you're going to be correcting that post well into next week. So off you go, dashing back and forth, login > edit > logout > check post > damn, another one > login > edit > check post etc., checking and rechecking, till you finally decide you don't really give a toss anymore. Which is about where I'm at right now.
So really, the moral of the story is this: 1. Never post direct to the web; good old Bill Gates will be making money off me on MS Office for awhile yet, and I suggest you let him do the same off you, too. 2. WYSIWYG is just another myth propagated by geeks OD-ing on Java; whenever you hear it, no matter who says it to you, duck behind the high-pressure air curtain and stay safe. 3. Clean up your post as best you can. Just don't give it more than 5 minutes, nothing is worth that kind of frustration. 5. Stop using punctuation altogether, be good to you and feed yourself some chocolate instead.