Designing the Web: Designing the Web: WYSIORLSTTLAUP

MacWeek, March 23, 1998 by Darcy Dinucci

In my mind, my column had been about the quest to design complex pages without knowing HTML, a process I called WYSIWYG. In retrospect, I realize how ambiguous the term WYSIWYG has become. My conclusion about what WYSIWYG means for Web design: It's useless.

No such thing

I've been using computers long enough to remember when the first WYSIWYG word processors began to replace WordStar, whose editing environment, which displayed tags in monospaced text, would seem very familiar to most of you. In pre-WYSIWYG word processors, you didn't see your layout (such as it was) until you sent your page to the printer.

Most Web designers create pages in the same kind of character-based text editors, and we don't see our layouts until we open a browser. WYSIWYG now refers to an application that lets you view your pages much as they will appear to users. You can see what you're doing and don't need to know about the underlying code.

As some of my correspondents pointed out, though, there is really no such thing as WYSIWYG on the Web. What you get depends on Web browsers. And since a page's look will vary depending on each user's system setup, what you personally get may be irrelevant because it's not necessarily what anyone else gets.

Is it useful to work in an environment that lets you place elements in a graphical layout? Absolutely. But calling them WYSIWYG is misleading. Let's just think of them as graphical page editors.

Why we keep plugging on

Some of my correspondents argue that Web designers should just throw in the towel. What they forget, I think, is that no matter where a page is displayed, it's going to need some layout. Style sheets just let the designers rather than the browser creators make those choices. With Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 (see http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-CSS2), we will be able to address the issue of various types of output devices by creating different style sheets for different media. The cascading rules of cascading style sheets handle conflicts between designer and user preferences. When Extensible Markup Language is fully adopted, style sheets won't be optional; they'll be the only method a browser has for parsing all those new tags into any sort of layout.

Designers should remember that they can't count on their designs being reproduced on the user's screen. Instead, let's say that those graphical page editors let them work in WYSIORLSTTLAUP mode - what you see is one recommended layout, subject to testing, luck and user preferences. I don't expect the acronym to catch on, but the phrase should be committed to memory.

Darcy DiNucci (darcy@tothepoint.com) is co-author of "Elements of Web Design." She consults on electronic information design from her office in San Francisco.