The phrase WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, and is used to describe a system in which content displayed during editing appears very similar to the final output. This final output can be a printed document, web page, slide presentation or even 3D graphics.
With Help Authoring Tools (HATs) leveraging the benefits of HTML tags and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to predefine layouts, WYSIWYG editors enabled technical writers to see the output without opening a browser. As web-based products and hence web-based documentation came into demand, many WYSIWYG editors evolved to allow the results to be viewed in Internet Explorer (IE). Some editors even used an emulator for IE, which required extra tags for the WYSIWYG display to work correctly, for example, the kadov tags in earlier versions of RoboHelp HTML.
While WYSIWYG became one of the most commonly used phrases in Technical Publications, it also became a misnomer, for developers and technical writers working with various HATs, and word processors realized that many times what they actually saw in the editor didn’t usually match the results. WYSIWYG was becoming a fallacy and the reality was closer to the description of WYSIOP (What You See is One Possibility).
The term WYSIOP was coined nearly a decade ago by Chris Lilley of the W3C but is all the more relevant in the context of XML-based authoring tools like RoboHelp 7 and Flare 4.2 where output results are determined by whatever layout template is assigned at the time the results are viewed. The use of conditional tagging, multiple style sheets and single-sourcing of content, lends further weight to the usage of the phrase WYSIOP, where results are dependent on the layout definition and styling for the specified output. Thus, you can view a Printed Output, or a .CHM output, or a Java Help using the same content and the same editor. With output media ranging from PDAs to phones, and content being linked to media-dependant style sheets, it is a good time for technical writers to shake away the habit of using Wiz-ee-Wig, and including WYSIOP in their vocabulary. Its time to say hello to Wiz-ee-Op!
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