WYSIWYM
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
WYSIWYM is an acronym for What You See Is What You Mean and refers to a 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, marking the content according to its meaning, its significance in the document, instead of designing its appearance. For example, in a WYSIWYM document the user might mark text as the title of the document, the name of a section, or the name of an author. Because of this, one needs to know the structure of the document (contents semantics) before editing it. Moreover, the editor also needs a system for exporting the edited text to generate the final format of the document, following the indicated structure.
The main advantage of this system is the total separation of presentation and content. Thus, the user can concentrate his efforts on writing the document and structuring it rather than concerning him- or herself with the appearance of the document, because appearance is left to the export system. Another advantage is that the same content can more easily be exported in different formats: visual, spoken, and the like.
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[edit] WYSIWYM word processors
The first WYSIWYM word processor (and also first editor) was LyX.[1] LyX is a graphical editor build on top of a LaTeX processor, so it, like LaTeX, is particularly suited for the editing of scientific documents, though, again like LaTeX, it can be used for a wide variety of purposes.
Inside LyX, the structure of a document is partly determined by the 'document layout' chosen for it. These layouts correspond to LaTeX document classes, though LyX can also work with DocBook. The export process is performed in two steps. First the contents are transformed from an internal format to LaTeX, and then the LaTeX processor is used to generate the output document in the requested format (DVI, PDF, etc.). An advantage of this system is that LyX can produce any format to which a LaTeX file can itself be converted.
[edit] WYSIWYM in web environments
Web page editing is clearly dominated by the WYSIWYG editing model. But, this model has been criticized,[2][3] primarily because of the low quality of the generated code, and there are voices advocating a change to the WYSIWYM model.[4][5][6]
The first WYSIWYM Web page editor was WYMEditor.[7] 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.
There is another project[8] 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)[9] available for demonstration purposes.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- WYMeditor - Standards compliant open source WYSIWYM web-based editor
- Extension:MeanEditor - An extension for Mediawiki providing a WYSIWYM editor based on WYMeditor
- LyX - LyX, a WYSIWYM document processor.
- scenari-platform.org - Scenari, a WYSIWYM XML-based editing and publishing Open Source software
[edit] References
- ^ Lyx Web site
- ^ Sauer, C.: WYSIWIKI - Questioning WYSIWYG in the Internet Age. In: Wikimania (2006)
- ^ Spiesser, J., Kitchen, L.: Optimization of html automatically generated by WYSIWYG programs. In: 13th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 355--364. WWW '04. ACM, New York, NY (New York, NY, USA, May 17-20, 2004)
- ^ 456BereaStreet
- ^ standards-schmandards
- ^ Thom Shannon's blog
- ^ WYMean Editor
- ^ WebCS Project
- ^ WebCS Editor
