WYSIWYG and the Modern Web
Friday, October 31st, 2008 by Enrico
I got the idea for this post when Jeff and I were reading a recent discussion on programming reddit. In summary, the poster was asking readers to help him convince his boss not to use Adobe Dreamweaver to develop their web application.
Back in the bad old days (by which I mean the 90’s of course) HTML largely pandered to visual designers who wanted to make good on the promise that visual web browsers like Mosaic and Netscape were making. Browsers were even competing to create their own proprietary tags to offer more whiz-bang features — I’m sure most of you remember “Best Viewed In” buttons. But no matter how many special tags were added to HTML to influence the visual layout and rendering of the page, the fact remained that to design a website you still had to fire up your favourite text editor and write code.
That is, until the WYSIWYG editors appeared. Microsoft Frontpage was (seemingly) the most popular among them. Heck, I even used it for a while and made a few websites with it — what? I was young and naive! And so started an era of computer generated web pages with completely unreadable and unstructured markup (except, that is, in the editor that created them) which completely strayed from the original vision of HTML and the WWW.
One of the main problems with this largely visual approach was that there was nothing mandating web browsers to be even remotely compatible with each other with regard to presentation; actually, some might argue that there still isn’t. The acceptance of CSS as a standard for supplying the visual aspect of web design was a huge step in bringing HTML back to sanity; the content and the presentation could be separated again and, with only a few caveats, it would render in roughly the same way across all modern browsers.
But CSS is not a perfect solution. Even when using CSS and HTML for web designs, some web designers still think of the web as a largely visual medium and don’t follow best practices for structuring HTML content and separating it from presentation using the full power that CSS offers. If I had a dime for every time I saw a DIV tag with id=”RightBar” or something like that, I’d probably be very, very rich. And don’t even get me started on accessibility. Structure is more important than ever now that the widespread popularity of AJAX has rekindled the dynamic HTML flame. A proper structure can easily be programmatically manipulated; tag soup cannot.
The point I’m trying to make is that while web standards have come a long way in encouraging people to do things “The Right Way”™, I think that people need to ultimately change the way in which they think about web design and development. And I think that there’s no technology that could ever achieve that. There’s no technology that will magically make people stop thinking of web design in the same way they do print. There is one thing I can say for sure: WYSIWYG editors do not make sense for the modern web.
And so I’ll keep my text editor, thank you very much.
Tags: Web Design, web development