In Web Environments
Major software vendors have integrated web-page creation features into their popular WYSIWYG products to increase their perceived relevance. Users can create an HTML web page in a word processor with no knowledge of HTML. The WYSIWYG model has been criticized, primarily because of the verbosity and low quality of the generated code, and there are voices advocating changing to the WYSIWYM model.
RDFaCE (RDFa Content Editor) is an example of WYSIWYM content editor. It is based on TinyMCE and uses dynamic CSS styles to distinguish semantic content from the normal content. RDFaCE WYSIWYM model is grounded on WYSIWYG model to facilitate semantic content authoring.
Another example of a WYSIWYM Web page editor is WYMeditor. In this editor the structure of the documents is defined by CSS classes for HTML elements. These classes also contain the information about the final appearance of the document. Although WYMeditor follows a WYSIWYM model, the document format is always HTML, so the new structures to be defined are limited to new classes. And the final document will always be built by applying presentational elements to these classes.
However, more recent developments include RenovatioCMS, a CMS (Content Management System) containing editing software that supports HTML, PHP, SQL, CSS and JavaScript. The combination of these languages results in a more complex syntax. To help the author interpret the code, different aspects of the code (tags, strings, subroutines and so forth) are highlighted or given different colours. This is comparable to the way code editing software like Notepad++ or HTMLKit works. So instead of using mark-up during editing to illustrate the end result (WYSIWYG), mark-up is used to illustrate the meaning and functionality of different parts of the code.
There is another project whose objective is defining a new architecture that allows the use of pure WYSIWYM editors. The structure of the documents is defined by means of a language, called WebCS, that is specifically designed for this goal. The created contents are saved in XML, tagged semantically. In order to give the contents their final appearance, the WebCS structures have an associated XSL transformation, which guides the conversion of this XML to its final format (XHTML or whatever desired file format).
In this system, the separation of presentation and content is performed by the pair XML-XSL, so it is made in an upper level of the separation given by HTML-CSS. On the other hand, the definition of new structures and transformations are a bit harder and require more knowledge. Although implementing final software is not a goal of this project, there is an editor (WebCS Editor) available for demonstration purposes.
Other CMS are moving into the direction of providing some WYSIWYM interface for their users editing content. Tiki Wiki CMS/Groupware version 7.0 is one of them, by means of using CodeMirror in-browser editing software.
Read more about this topic: WYSIWYM
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