HTML Editors - Difficulties in Achieving WYSIWYG

Difficulties in Achieving WYSIWYG

A given HTML document will have an inconsistent appearance on various platforms and computers for several reasons:

Different browsers and applications will render the same markup differently.

The same page may display slightly differently in Internet Explorer and Firefox on a high-resolution screen, but it will look very different in the perfectly valid text-only Lynx browser. It needs to be rendered differently again on a PDA, an internet-enabled television and on a mobile phone. Usability in a speech or braille browser, or via a screen-reader working with a conventional browser, will place demands on entirely different aspects of the underlying HTML. Printing the page, via different browsers and different printers onto various paper sizes, around the world, places other demands. With the correct use of modern HTML and CSS there is no longer any need to provide 'Printable page' links and then have to maintain two versions of the whole site. Nor is there any excuse for pages not fitting the user's preferred paper size and orientation, or wasting ink printing solid background colours unnecessarily, or wasting paper reproducing navigation panels that will be entirely useless once printed out.

Browsers and computer graphics systems have a range of user settings.

Resolution, font size, colour, contrast etc can all be adjusted at the user's discretion, and many modern browsers allow even more user control over page appearance. All an author can do is suggest an appearance.

Web browsers, like all computer software, have bugs

They may not conform to current standards. It is hopeless to try to design Web pages around all of the common browsers' current bugs: each time a new version of each browser comes out, a significant proportion of the World Wide Web would need re-coding to suit the new bugs and the new fixes. It is generally considered much wiser to design to standards, staying away from 'bleeding edge' features until they settle down, and then wait for the browser developers to catch up to your pages, rather than the other way round. For instance, no one can argue that CSS is still 'cutting edge' as there is now widespread support available in common browsers for all the major features, even if many WYSIWYG and other editors have not yet entirely caught up.

A single visual style can represent multiple semantic meanings

Semantic meaning, derived from the underlying structure of the HTML document, is important for search engines and also for various accessibility tools. On paper we can tell from context and experience whether bold text represents a title, or emphasis, or something else. But it is very difficult to convey this distinction in a WYSIWYG editor. Simply making a piece of text bold in a WYSIWYG editor is not sufficient to tell the editor *why* the text is bold - what the boldness represents semantically.

What you see may be what most visitors get, but it is not guaranteed to be what everyone gets.