Thursday, October 12, 2006

wysiwyg

what you see is what you get.

what a simple concept. i remember when i tried to use a word processing program some years ago and recently when trying to make webpages i had a difficult time trying to understand that something that looked one way when you made it in a certain program would look completely different when you tried to print it or send it or whatever.

i realise there are limitations regarding software compatability etc. and i see some improvements and simplifications but i wanted what i saw to be what i got.

obviously someone recognises thre fact.


the reason why wysiwyg is so appealing is because reality operates that way. when you look at a green field with a stream running across it and a fence you know that you`d better wear your boots if you ant to get to the other side. if the dog is growling and barking, don`t offer your hand.
so programmers work toward providing wysiwyg environments for thier software. the computer game industry is a prime example. reality is the key.

so now we come to my point in all this. when you go to imagine something happening in your life, the more real you can make it in your mind, the more intense the feelings are and the stronger your field of attraction becomes. the stronger and longer this field exists for, the more certain that event will occur.

whoever designed the virtual reality environment in our heads had this in mind.

wysiwyg.

and by the way, if you have any doubts about this process, just realise that you`ve been doing this all your life. everything that surrounds you, you attracted.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, it depends on what you mean, in regards to web-design. If you want to print something from a website, as well as wanting the print-out to match exactly what the website looks like (wysiwyg), sometimes it is actually a browser setting that is altering the page from screen to printer. This can often be remedied by going into the browser settings/options and telling it to print background colors. Other times it may just be badly designed websites that are still mis-aligned with today's web-standards. Also sometimes you have to print a website using the landscape mode if it's a wide website, or it may squish/misconstrue some of the intended styles.

As for the browser settings though, ...for instance, if you have a page that has a black background, and white text, if you didn't tell it to print the background color, then it may print a page with a white background & white/light-gray/black text, depending on the browser settings. If that's not part of what you're talking about, then maybe a clarification would help me grasp what you're saying.

Also, just to get you up to speed, when internet browsers were first being developed, there was a sort of browser war raging; since the different browsers were competing, web-standards were often disregarded &/or intepreted differently. That's why wysiwyg was so terrible to design around back then, and why many web-designers had to fork websites into two different sites; usually one for IE, and one for netscape. However, allot has changed since those days, but there are still some discrepencies even today.

The web-browser Firefox has solved many of those browser-inconsistencies and is a standards-compliant browser. However IE6 has the largest user share. IE6 did have many improvements, but it isn't over yet. The good news is that IE is integrating allot more standards-compliance in IE7, and they are going to push it as a critical update when it comes out, so that shift will likely have a pretty major impact in the browser-shares, and will likely make wysiwyg web-standards allot easier to integrate.

There's some aspects of DOM Scripting that can automatically convert a webpage into pdf's on the fly. PDF's are allot more printer-friendly, but that part hasn't been integrated into many web-designer's repotoir; usually only uppity web-designers & large corporate entities that write articles for mass-media & what-not. Though, there is some headway in that regards, especially for blogging & cms's.

Also, if you're looking for a really exciting wysiwyg host, I definitely reccommend looking into Squarespace; at the moment they're about as top-notch as you can possibly get in regards to features & wysiwyg ease-of-use; in my opinion anyway. Terapad also just popped up recently and is also pretty impressive; but I still think squarespace is the easiest to use.

I'd go into more detail about what's happening nowadays with web-designers, but allot of it may be geek-speak, and I'm sure I've already bored you wih enough of my banter already. I will say this though, part of the barrier of what I'm understanding about how you perceive wysiwyg, is that accessibility for visual/auditorily impared people is one of the reasons why website-styles & website-content are now being separated into separate files. So when a screenreader comes allong, it doesn't run into a whole lot of gobbly-gook styles that mix up the clean text into programming soup. However, allot of times, even today, there are outdated web-designers still designing with old web-standards, which are actually worse for what you're talking about.

One of the key websites that made that change extremely popular (separation of content & style) is css Zen Garden. If you sift through that website, you may see what I'm talking about in regards to separation of content & style. If you want a pretty good guide on basic web-standards, and to understand the basics of xhtml & css, this is a really good primer; skip 1st page if you already grasp those basics. Also, if you are a Firefox user, I highly reccommend grabbing a copy of the Web Developer Extension, it's a very useful tool for looking into how websites work.

I'd list a bunch of websites to refer to, but there are way too many; so I'll list just a few of the well-known ones, in case you're interested:

http://webstandards.org
http://thinkvitamin.com
http://alistapart.com

Some savvy tools to use:
http://scrutinizethis.com
http://crazyegg.com

Some top-notch web-standards & web-2.0 events; some of them are finished & offer complete podcasts & pdf-presentations; some really fascinating stuff:
http://2005.dconstruct.org
http://2006.dconstruct.org
http://wd06.com
http://aneventapart.com
http://atmedia2005.co.uk
http://www.vivabit.com/atmedia2006/
http://carsonworkshops.com/summit/
http://carsonworkshops.com/summit/2006/london/

Some software for wysiwyg web-design:
http://adobe.com/dreamweaver/
http://westciv.com/style_master/

For more websites, the ones listed at the links below will give you plenty to sift through:
http://protolize.org
http://alvit.de/handbook/
http://alvit.de/web-dev/

9:14 PM
Anonymous said...

oops, had forgot to throw in a link for a little bit of history about browser wars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars

10:14 PM

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