Why? WYSIWYG works perfectly well in InDesign (which is absolutely awesome, by the way), why can it never work with HTML? I don’t really understand.
Current and past implementations are or have been bad, sure, but why can’t it work in principle?
Current and past implementations are or have been bad, sure, but why can’t it work in principle?
Which means asking questions like "this is 36 pixels high: is it a heading,; or is this just a landing page with big text?" etc. So maybe I lack imagination, but I don't see it being that easy a problem to solve from a UI point of view.
Yeah, you would still be able to just ignore all that – just like you can adjust each headline individually in InDesign – but that would only mean that you are an incompetent user of the software. A good WYSIWYG editor wouldn’t always have to produce great markup but a competent user of the software should be able to easily make it produce great markup.
I’m really not that sure why adding a GUI for semantics would be so hard, especially since existing concepts like paragraph or list styles already map very well to HTML concepts.
Then there is the fact that something like an Indesign document doesn't really have any concept of separating the style from the actual content. For the time being at least, humans are much better at logically ordering and marking up text, and then adding the style with CSS, unlike programs which add a whole lot of extra markup and CSS to do the same thing.
Those are just a few things which make WYSIWIG work a lot better for print than it ever could for web - and there are more... These things will probably be somewhat resolved as time goes on (ie. with wider support for @font-face and so on) but I think that hand written HTML will be better for a long time to come.
Being able to flexibly test (e.g. different fonts, different resolutions, different browsers) would certainly be one of the requirements, as would be the implicit assumption that pixel perfect designs are not possible.
As for style and content? InDesign does actually separate them to a degree. It’s not perfect but neither is HTML at that task. The concept of character, paragraph, list and table styles is central to InDesign. It’s what makes InDesign so great. It even has a bare bones text input mode where all you do is type completely unstyled text. It’s then easy to apply all the different styles you made to your text.
I think a truly powerful WYSIWYG HTML editor is eminently possible, someone has only dare to do it.