In computing, a WYSIWYG editor is a system in which content (text and graphics) onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, which might be a printed document, web page, or slide presentation.
The somehow cryptic abbreviation WYSIWYG stands for “What You See Is What You Get”. In such editors you edit not directly the source code of your documents, but its presentation as it (hopefully) will appear in the final document. So instead of writing blocks of code manually (as you e.g. would do it in Word or Latex), you manipulate with design components using an editor window. This means that you view something very similar to the end result while the document or image is being created.You can make a strong argument for hand-coding HTML, but the appeal of a What You See Is What You Get editor for beginners is undeniable. When it comes to coding editors, it’s hard to a get a clear overview of all the benefits and functionalities different editors have to offer. However, in the end everybody needs one, so it’s important to know which editor is best tailored to your personal needs. It would be wrong to recommend you some “best” editors, because the choice always depends on your requirements, primary goals, skills and experience. Many of these editors combine the best of both worlds, allowing you to hand edit your code if you wish and work with the WYSIWYG editor when it’s more convenient.
Dreamweaver is a titan in the WYSIWYG world. Now part of the Adobe portfolio but originally launched by Macromedia, Dreamweaver has offered WYSIWYG editing since 1997 when the web was a maze of tiled backgrounds, electric blue links and blinking GIFs. Dreamweaver offers hybrid editing, you can work completely in WYSIWYG mode without ever seeing a bit of code, you can work directly in the code only switching over to preview your work, or you can work in a dual-pane environment to take advantage of WYSIWYG and hand-coding simultaneously. Dreamweaver is extensible with dozens of free and commercial plugs-ins available for everything from web effects and widgets to shopping carts and image galleries. This tool is one of the commonly used editors which can support developers, improve the workflow and save you a lot of time during coding. While previous versions of Dreamweaver sometimes produced rather quirky source code, the last version is able to generate (mostly) quite clean markup. Dreamweaver also offers numerous helpful tools such as the library of code snippets, ftp management, server debug and an integrated coding development. E.g. you can view CSS information in a single, unified CSS panel that makes it easy to see the styles applied to a specific element, identify where attributes are defined, and edit existing styles without entering Code view
Aloha Editor is most advanced browser HTML5 based WYSIWYG editor giving its users a distinctive and new experience. Aloha Editor is designed to make editing process faster. It makes the work 25% faster by reducing the few time consuming steps such as typing and formatting. Aloha Editor is ready to use when website is loaded, even if users need 20 or 100 inputs areas Aloha Editor only loaded once. Aloha Editor doesn’t need iframes thus the result in saving up 80 percent of loading time compare to other editors. Aloha Editor allows users to edit content such as accordions, sliders, tickers, captions or descriptions of images in slideshows. Aloha Editor is the world’s first full featured editor that allows users to edit the dynamic content live and in place.
iWeb Editors is an editor for non-professionals, newbies and small companies. The “It just works!” design philosophy that permeates Apple offerings is strong with iWeb—the WYSIWYG HTML editor bundled with iLife—and interacting with it is so drag-and-drop and user friendly that even your friends least likely to learn HTML could whip together a functioning web site. Apple provides a number of polished templates and dozens of web site widgets that are all a mouse click away. iWeb’s built-in site manager makes it easy to publish to multiple sites or just keep a close eye on your ever-expanding digital manifesto. iWeb is small, compact and simple. You can switch the theme of any page with the click of your mouse. Mix themes in a site if you wish. You can place Google Maps and Google AdSense ads on your web pages and simplify navigation by dragging your photo albums to a sleek, animated index page. Web widgets, live content from other sites, like video, stock tickers, and headline news can also be added with few clicks.
Expression Web is Microsoft’s current offering in the WYSIWYG arena (the popular but much maligned FrontPage was retired in 2003). For those of you who associate Microsoft with poor web standards compliance, take comfort knowing that Expression Web has a totally separate engine from Internet Explorer and is compliant with a wide range of current web standards. It shares a lot of features with the other WYSIWYG editors featured here, like highlighting code errors and non-compliant code, a built-in CSS editor, and more, it also stands out for features like search engine optimization—offering you tips and ideas to optimize your sites for better crawling and search engine ranking.
Flux is a Mac-based WYSIWYG editor that has received high praise for being a powerful editor with a reasonable price tag. Flux’s interface offers a fine degree of control over editing everything from the margins and padding to over all size of your elements including altering CSS code with simple mouse movements. Flux offers dual-pane editing so you can switch between hand-editing and drag-and-drop editing instantly or just watch the HTML code unfold as you WYSIWYG edit to study what’s going on under the hood. Like Dreamweaver, Flux supports third-party plug-ins which are available for download through the Flux application.
BlueGriffon is a WYSIWYG web editor created by the author of the Nvu (deprecated) web editor software (as well as the bulk of its derivative, KompoZer 0.7.10). Since it uses the modern Firefox web rendering engine, it should be able to handle modern HTML and CSS code correctly unlike the older Nvu and KompoZer 0.7.10 software, allowing you to use such code and see the results displayed accurately in the editor. Besides support for HTML 4, HTML 5, XHTML 1, CSS 3, it also supports SVG, and MathML. The editor has a plug-in architecture so you may also be able to find add-ins that extend the functionality of the program. Languages supported include English, German, French, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Slovenian, Polish and Swedish (and possibly others). The program runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It is open source. You can find a free online BlueGriffon Tutorial on thesitewizard.com. BlueGriffon is an intuitive application that provides Web authors (beginners or more advanced) with a simple User Interface allowing to create attractive Web sites without requiring extensive technical knowledge about Web Standards.
PATRICIA GOMEZ 