What Is What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)?
Imagine you're creating a very important document for work. You've spent hours pouring over the details, and now it's time to print your masterpiece. When you print it, it looks nothing like what you expected. What do you do? You can either start over from scratch or go back and redo everything by hand. Neither option is ideal, so why not just see what the final product will look like beforehand? That way, if there are any errors or mistakes in your original design, they can be corrected before printing begins. The feature that allows this is called WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), which allows users to see how something will appear before they produce it. WYSIWYG mimics how something will appear, allowing the user to return to the editing state for any changes or modifications that might be required before the work is turned into a Web page or printed document. WYSIWYG, which stands for "what you see is what you get," was initially coined by an engineer named Larry Sinclair to describe a recently invented the prepress typesetting machine's page layout function. In other words, when you're working on a document on a computer screen, it looks exactly the way it will look when printed out. It was then popularized in the late 1970s by editors Arlene and Jose Ramos, who published a newsletter called WYSIWYG for the prepress industry. Today, this term is used significantly often when discussing web publishing. You can think of it as the opposite of HTML. Instead of writing code to publish your document online, you can use an application that feels more like a word processor than a development application. Just about every modern blogging application has a WYSIWYG interface!
Related Terms by Emerging Technology
Join Our Newsletter
Get weekly news, engaging articles, and career tips-all free!
By subscribing to our newsletter, you're cool with our terms and conditions and agree to our Privacy Policy.