WYSIWYM Totally Explained

Everything about Wysiwym totally explained

WYSIWYM is an acronym for What You See Is What You Mean and refers to the paradigm for document editing. It is an alternative to the better known WYSIWYG paradigm.
In a WYSIWYM editor, the user writes the contents in a structured way, following their semantic value, instead of designing their aesthetic. For example, the user tells the editor that he's writing a title, a section, or an author. Because of this, one needs to know the structure of the document (contents semantic) before editing it. Moreover, the editor also needs an exporting system that generates the final format of the document, following the used structure and the written text.
The main advantage of this system is the total separation of presentation and content. Thus, the user can concentrate his efforts on writing the contents and structuring them, without concern about the appearance, because it's left to the export system. Another advantage is that the same content can be exported to different formats.

WYSIWYM word processors

The first WYSIWYM word processor (and also first editor) was LyX. LyX is a graphic editor build on top of a LaTeX processor, so it's focused upon, but not limited to, the edition of scientific documents.
Inside LyX, the structure of the documents is given as LyX document layouts. Each of these layouts rely on a LaTeX document class. In its turn, the export process is performed in two steps, first the contents are transformed from an internal format to LaTeX, and then, the LaTeX processor generates the document in the requested format (DVI, PDF, etc.)

WYSIWYM in web environments

Web page edition is clearly dominated by the WYSIWYG editing model. But, this model has been criticized, primarily because of the low quality of the generated code, and there are voices advocating a change to the WYSIWYM model.
   The first WYSIWYM Web page editor was 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 it follows a WYSIWYM model, the document format is always HTML, so the new structures to be defined are limited to add new classes. And the final document will be build by applying presentational elements to these classes.
   There is a project whose objective is defining a new architecture that allows the use of pure WYSIWYM editors. The structure of the documents is defined with a language, called WebCS, specifically designed for this goal. The created contents are saved in XML, tagged with its semantic values. 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 if performed by the pair XML-XSL, so it's 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 in not a goal of this project, there's an editor (WebCS Editor) available for demonstrating purposes.

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