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What You See Isn't Always What You Get

FREE ARTICLE #19

When you use a visual HTML editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, they tell you that WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get. This means that, in theory, what you see while you're editing the page should look just like what you get when you're done.

While word processors have pretty much got the concept working now when it comes to printing (it didn't used to be as reliable), there are still problems when it comes to HTML editors and web browsers - of course, if you've spent more than five minutes using visual HTML editors, then you'll know that.

The Advantages of WYSIWYG.

WYSIWYG is quite uncontroversial at this point – its advantages are clear, in that it lets you make your page look exactly the way you want it to while you're writing it, with no surprises. In the early days, it was sometimes referred to as being like a kind of 'interactive print preview'.

Professional typesetters were at first opposed to its use in publishing, but it's easy and quick enough that it has come to dominate. The alternative now, though, is to go back to the days of layout commands, which isn't something most users want to do.

On the web, WYSIWY it can be far more problematic, because what comes out of the other end of the program isn't a static, printed page - it's computer code, HTML, that has to be interpreted by a web browser before it becomes anything viewable.

Not Even All Browsers are the Same.

The first problem with what you see in an editor being what you get in a browser is that all the different browsers available don't always make the same page look the same way. How are HTML editors supposed to account for bugs in Internet Explorer? They can't, really.

Each piece of HTML editing software is forced to either write its own HTML rendering engine (the engine that decides how the code is translated to a visible page), or use one from an existing program.

Recently, for example, Dreamweaver moved over to Opera's engine, which means that it shows pages the way Opera does. FrontPage has always been closest to Internet Explorer. Because Mozilla is open source, there are a lot of HTML editors based on its engine, the most usable of which is Nvu.

That doesn't exactly help, though, when it comes to things looking the same in every browser - if you use Dreamweaver, for example, what you see will be what you get in Opera, but not necessarily in Internet Explorer. This is a problem that can be partially solved by testing everything in every browser, but doing that doesn't let you see what your page is going to look like as you're going along.

Maybe What You See Shouldn't Be What You Get.

While users demand WYSIWYG software, it's somewhat misguided when it comes to the web, for the simple reason that it expects everyone to be using your site the same way, and designs towards that expected use.

In reality, the web was designed to be a document format that was interpreted by the program receiving it, meaning that if a browser wants to leave out all the graphics, or ignore all your tables, then it's perfectly justified in doing so. This is especially significant when it comes to mobile browsers - they simply don't have large enough screens to display normal designs, and it's silly to force them to try.

Realising this is one of the most important differences between being a good designer and being a bad one.

Bad designers will be constantly nudging at their designs, doing everything they can think of to get them to look exactly the way they intended in every browser possible, even if it doubles the size and complexity of the code.

A good designer will write good code that displays in all browsers,
but doesn't necessarily have to be pixel-perfect.

WEB DESIGN INDEX LISTING

SITE MAP

  1. 6 Reasons Why You Need a Website
  2. How the Web Works
  3. Registering a Domain Name
  4. The Confusing World of Web Hosting - Making Your Decision
  5. How to Set Up Your Hosting in 5 Minutes Flat
  6. Websites and Web logs - What's the Difference?
  7. What Do You Want Your Website to Do?
  8. Hiring Professionals - 5 Things to Look For
  9. Working With Templates
  10. Building a Budget Website
  11. There's More than One Web Browser
  12. Image Formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG and More
  13. The Many Flavours of HTML
  14. Clean Page Structure - Headings and Lists
  15. The Importance of Validation
  16. Avoiding the Nuts and Bolts - Content Management Software
  17. FrontPage - Easy Pages
  18. Dreamweaver - The Professional Touch
  19. What You See Isn't Always What You Get
  20. Why Doing It Yourself is Best
  21. Understanding Web Jargon
  22. Don't Be Scared, It's Only Code - HTML for Beginners
  23. 5 Steps to Understanding HTML
  24. Taking HTML Further
  25. Finding a Good HTML Editor
  26. CSS and the End of Tables
  27. Column Designs with CSS
  28. The Basics of Web Servers
  29. LAMP - The Most Popular Server System Ever
  30. IIS and ASP - Microsoft's Server
  31. Setting up a Test Server on Your Own Computer
  32. How Databases Work
  33. Which Database is Right for You?
  34. Uploading Your Website with FTP
  35. PHP - Easy Dynamic Websites
  36. Perl - Cryptic Power
  37. ColdFusion - Quicker Scripting, at a Price
  38. JSP - Java on Your Server
  39. Python and Ruby - the Newer Alternatives
  40. Taking HTML Further with Javascript
  41. VBScript - Javascript Made Easy
  42. AJAX - Should You Believe the Hype?
  43. The Web Designer's Toolbox
  44. An Introduction to Paint Shop Pro
  45. Photoshop - a Graphic Designer's Dream
  46. Free Graphics Alternatives
  47. How to Install and Configure a Forum
  48. Building Online Communities
  49. Using Quizzes and Games to Get Traffic
  50. Offering Free Downloads on Your Website
  51. Putting Multimedia to Good Use
  52. Opening a Web Shop with E-Commerce Software
  53. 5 Simple Steps to Accepting Payments
  54. Encryption & Security with SSL
  55. The Basics of Web Forms
  56. 7 Ways to Make Your Web Forms Better
  57. The Web is Not Paper
  58. Writing for the Web
  59. A Question of Scroll Bars
  60. Titles and Headlines - It's Not a Newspaper
  61. All About Design - Principles and Elements
  62. Designing for Search Engines
  63. Printing and Sending - the Two Things Users Want to Do
  64. The Art of the Logo
  65. Picking a Colour Scheme
  66. Fonts are More Important Than You Think
  67. Beware the Stock Photographer - Picking Your Pictures
  68. The Smaller, the Better - Avoiding Graphical Overload
  69. An Issue of Width - the Resolution Problem
  70. Why Word is Bad for the Web
  71. The 5 Principles of Effective Navigation
  72. Focus on the User - Task-Oriented Websites
  73. Making Searches Simple
  74. Time for User Testing
  75. Hints All the Way
  76. The Case Against Flash
  77. Using Flash Sensibly
  78. The Evils of PDF's
  79. Why Java Will Drive Your Visitors Away
  80. 5 Ways to Avoid the 1998 Look
  81. Content is King
  82. Why You Should Put Your Content in a Weblog Format
  83. Cut to the Chase - How to Make Your Website Load Faster
  84. How to Run Ads Without Driving Visitors Crazy
  85. Ads Under the Radar - Linking to Affiliates
  86. Text Ads - Unobtrusive Advertising
  87. The Top 10 Biggest Web Design Mistakes
  88. Why You Should Stick to Design Conventions
  89. 10 Easy Ways to Promote Your Website
  90. Making Friends and Influencing People - the Importance of Links
  91. How to Get Your Website Talked About on Blogs
  92. Tracking Your Visitors
  93. RSS - Really Simple Syndication
  94. Taking Your Website Mobile
  95. Registering Your Users by Stealth
  96. How to Make Visitors Add You to Their Favourites
  97. Setting Up a Mailing List
  98. Designing for Sales
  99. It's a World Wide Web - Going International
  100. Some Places to Go For More Information

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