Critique of current WYSIWYM web-page composers

WYMeditor is the best-known WYSIWYM web page editor. WYSIWYM stands for What You See Is What You Mean. In a WYSIWYM editor, the user creates a document with structured, meaningful content. The presentation of the content is out of his hands. The separation of content from its look and feel makes it possible to view the document in many ways on many devices, which is a central principle of good web design.

The WYSIWYM principle undoubtedly is suitable for web design, but WYMeditor has serious drawbacks. It was tricky to set up in the author’s own experience. A web page cannot embed it. According to an old Wikipedia article on WYMeditor (now archived on Archive.org),²⁷ “One downside of WYMeditor is that it cannot be used to include JavaScript in the content it edits. Changing this would require eliminating WYMeditor’s use of the innerHtml property.” Thus, WYMeditor won’t work with reactive widgets.

The author might expand this section to cover a representative set of WYSIWYM composers.