It's WYSIWYM Not WYSIWYG

If you're in web development then you've heard the term WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and probably cringe at even the slightest mention of it. Among what would be considered a WYSIWYG includes Dreamweaver, Front Page, and a host of others that web developers would rather not think about. However, with the advent of the CMS (Content Management System), clients needed a way to create their own content without having to know or learn HTML and/or CSS. A WYSIWYG seemed like the perfect idea for this to be accomplished but a WYSIWYG produces bloated, unsemantic, non-semantic, poor code. Not to mention that they are usually packaged with many additional options and features that clients do not need to be using. Thus the WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) was born. What does this mean? Instead of simply producing lines and lines of code to accurately produce what the client is trying to create with their content a WYSIWYM is designed to accurately interpret what the client is trying to accomplish with clean, semantic code. There has been the option to provide clients with a much simpler interface than what a WYSIWYG or WYSIWYM can provide but these require learning new syntax that typically clients are unwilling to do. So what are the options that we currently have available? WYSIWYG TinyMCE • Currently the powerhouse but difficult to install, and configure correctly. FCKeditor • A strong competitor to TinyMCE WYSIWYM WYMeditor • My personal favorite for the intuitive interface, and semantic markup. Loki • Still in BETA and not completely semantic. Humane Web Text Generator Textism • Clean interface, easy to use but requires use of new syntax I think that Textism is a very strong and useful program and would be used a lot more if it wasn't for the learning curve of new syntax but I think that future relies on the progress of the WYSIWYM editor. TinyMCE currently has the market share and with certain modifications can be made closer to a WYSIWYM than a WYSIWYG, however, I think that we will begin to see the WYMeditor (and others like it) began to quickly crop up across the web.