Comment by ronaldj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ronaldj | Hacker News Reader

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As someone that writes HTML for a living I couldn't imagine using a WYSIWYG editor. A lot of markup, especially the new semantic HTML5 stuff is pretty subjective. Different organizations/teams have different markup patterns/views on this stuff. A WYSIWYG editor would have to be pretty customizable to fit in different organizations I think.

You can use Firebug/Web Inspector to adjust your layouts in real-time without needing to go back, modify code in your editor, save, and reload the page. There are some new tools (backfire) out that will even let Firebug/Web Inspector automatically update your CSS file so you don't have to go back after tweaking it in browser. Hopefully, browser vendors will one day bake this functionality in to their browsers.

The biggest time sink is not being able to drag and drop it's cross browser support. I can spit out a page from a design pretty quick, but getting it to look consistent across four or five different browsers takes forever.

  > As someone that writes HTML for a living I couldn't imagine using a WYSIWYG editor.

You can't imaging using any existing WYSIWYG editor. I would argue that using Firebug to make changes, see them in real time, and have the code auto-saved is just begging for a good WYSIWYG editor. Image if a WYSIWYG editor could create decent markup and css and provide perfect cross-browser support for all relatively modern browsers. You still couldn't imagine using it?

WYSIWYG has two major disadvantages:

1) It's hard to share components of WYSIWYG design across different projects.

2) It's hard to see what differences are between two versions in source control system. In order to do that you still need look at underlying code.

This still seems to focus too much on what WYSIWYG is now, as opposed to what it could be.

Problem 1 can be solved by designing your WYSIWYG editor UI around modular page components and templates, kind of like desktop software designers like QtCreator.

Problem 2 is a matter of designing a good visual diff tool for the DOM. You could combine the Tilt Firefox addon with other visual difference tools like A/B overlays and highlighting changed attributes (e.g. if the text color or border size is changed on a particular element between two versions being compared, set the text or border color or size of that element to some highly-contrasting or even animated value when the element is hovered in the diff view).

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