In computing , What You See Is What You Mean ( WYSIWYM, / ˈ w ɪ z i w ɪ m / ) is a paradigm for editing a structured document . It is an adjunct to the better-known WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) paradigm, which displays the result of a formatted document as it will appear on screen or in print—without showing the descriptive code underneath.
25-420: In a WYSIWYM editor, the user writes the contents in a structured way, marking the content according to its meaning, its significance in the document, and leaves its final appearance up to one or more separate style sheets . In essence, it aims to accurately display the contents being conveyed, rather than the actual formatting associated with it. For example, in a WYSIWYM document, one would manually mark text as
50-565: A markup language such as XML / HTML / CSS and PDF , or directly rendered down for final presentation in anything from PostScript to raw text. A different approach to the WYSIWYM philosophy is taken by GNU TeXmacs , which combines the on-screen representation of the document structure with an almost-faithful WYSIWYG rendering. Major software vendors have integrated web-page creation features into their popular WYSIWYG products to increase their utility. Users can create an HTML web page in
75-452: A document may be authored (i.e., viewed and edited) using two possible page views, the styling tags (called "formats") and contents of a document reside in "body pages", while structure and presentation are defined by "master pages". Multiple such documents can be linked together and programmed conditionally for a variety of applications. These elements can then be exported to corresponding tags which preserve some or all of their functionality in
100-665: A document. Structured documents generally focus on labeling things that can be used for a variety of processing purposes, not merely formatting. For example, explicit labeling of "chapter title" or "emphasis" is far more useful to systems for the visually impaired, than merely "Helvetica bold 24" or "italic". In the same way, meaningful labeling of the many items on a technical information sheet enables far better integration with databases, search systems, online catalogs, and so on. Structured documents generally support at least hierarchical structures, for example lists, not merely list items; sections, not merely section headings; and so on. This
125-420: A more useful reading interface. When travel companies provide itineraries as structured documents rather than just displays, user tools can easily extract the necessary facts and pass them on to calendar or other applications. In HTML a part of the logical structure of a document may be the document body; <body> , containing a first level heading; <h1> , and a paragraph; <p> . One of
150-576: A set of stylistic rules – describing, for example, colors, fonts and layout – must be applied. A collection of stylistic rules is called a style sheet. Style sheets in the form of written documents have a long history of use by editors and typographers to ensure consistency of presentation, spelling and punctuation. In electronic publishing, style sheet languages are mostly used in the context of visual presentation rather than spelling and punctuation. All style sheet languages offer functionality in these areas: Structured document A structured document
175-420: A system for exporting structured content to generate the document's final format, following the indicated structure. The main advantage of this system is the total separation of content and presentation : users can structure and write the document once, rather than repeatedly alternating between the two modes of presentation—an approach which comes with its own switch cost . And since the rendering of formatting
200-664: A visual display (although an intelligent agent may be able to discern a structural meaning lurking behind the tag). The "strong" tag is "descriptive" or "structural" in that it is intended to label an abstract, quasi-linguistic property of its content, rather than to describe the appropriate presentation in some particular medium. Some other structural tags in HTML include <abbr>, <acronym>, <address>, <cite>, <del>, <dfn>, <ins>, <kbd>, and <q> . Other schemas such as DocBook and TEI have far larger selections. The anchor <a> tag
225-458: A word processor with no knowledge of HTML, but like nearly all IDE authored or handwritten web markup, these tools' automated analysis of the source format rarely accounts for a distinction between HTML's content and its presentation through means such as CSS during output. Such fixed-presentation HTML generators have been criticized, primarily because of the bloatedness and low quality of their code, and there are voices advocating for changes to
250-420: Is an electronic document where some method of markup is used to identify the whole and parts of the document as having various meanings beyond their formatting. For example, a structured document might identify a certain portion as a "chapter title" (or "code sample" or "quatrain") rather than as "Helvetica bold 24" or "indented Courier". Such portions in general are commonly called "components" or "elements" of
275-476: Is in stark contrast to formatting-oriented systems. High-end systems also support multiple independent and/or overlapping sets of components. Structured document systems commonly permit creating explicit rules defining component types and how they may be combined. Such a set of rules is called a "schema" by analogy with database schemas . Several formal languages exist for specifying them, such as XSD , Relax NG , and Schematron . A structured document which obeys
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#1732782487737300-598: Is left to the export system, this also makes it easier to achieve consistency in design as well. Unlike an unstructured, fixed-presentation document, a document processor rather than a word processor must be used for WYSIWYM. The first document processor which articulated itself through the WYSIWYM term was LyX document processor, although similar concepts can be traced back to earlier publishing systems such as LaTeX , TPS (modeled on pioneering experiments at Xerox PARC ) and FrameMaker . For example, in FrameMaker,
325-399: Is not entirely intuitive. In principle, just what constitutes "structure" vs. non-structure can vary. In a book specifically about typography, tagging something as "italic" or "bold" may well be the whole point. For example, a discussion of when to use particular styles will likely want to give examples and counter-examples, which would no longer make sense if the rendering is not in sync with
350-815: Is now favored. One very widely used representation for structured documents is HTML , a schema defined and described by the W3C . However, HTML has not only tags for meaning-oriented components such as paragraph, title, and code; but also format-oriented ones such as italic, bold, and most table. In practice, HTML is sometimes used as a structured document system, but often used as a formatting language. Many domains use structured documents via domain-specific schemas they have co-operatively developed, such as JATS for journal publishing, TEI for literary documents, UBL and EDI for business interchange, XTCE for spacecraft telemetry, REST for Web interfaces, and countless more. All these cases use specific schemas based on XML . XML
375-480: Is that the content can be reused in many contexts and presented in various ways. Different style sheets can be attached to the logical structure to produce different presentations. One modern style sheet language with widespread use is Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which is used to style documents written in HTML , XHTML , SVG , XUL , and other markup languages . For content in structured documents to be presented,
400-472: Is the universal format for structured documents and data on the Web In writing structured documents the focus is on encoding the logical structure of a document, with less or even no explicit work devoted to its presentation to humans by printed pages or screens (in some cases, no such use is even expected). Structured documents can easily be processed by computer systems to extract and present derivative forms of
425-635: Is used for another slightly different kind of structure, namely the interconnection or cross-reference structure, rather than the interval section division. This is most definitely structure, and in fact it is possible to create alternate markup for documents that expresses the same particular structures in either way (for example, using transclusion to represent section contents, rather than navigational hyperlink presentations). HTML from early on has also had tags which express presentational semantics, such as bold ( <b> ) or italic ( <i> ), or to alter font sizes or which had other effects on
450-402: The WYSIWYM model. One example of a WYSIWYM Web page editor is WYMeditor . In this editor, the structure of the documents is defined by the class attributes of HTML elements. These classes also allow the final appearance of the document to be applied. Although WYMeditor follows a WYSIWYM model, the document format is always HTML, so the new structures to be defined are limited to new classes, and
475-678: The document. In most Misplaced Pages articles for example, a table of contents is automatically generated from the different heading tags in the body of the document. Because the SGML conversion of the Oxford English Dictionary explicitly distinguished the many different meanings which attach to the print version's use of italics, search tools can retrieve entries based on etymology, quotations, and many other features of interest. When HTML provides structural rather than merely formatting information, visually impaired users can be easily given
500-416: The final document will always be built by applying presentational elements to these classes. Other CMSs are moving in the direction of providing some WYSIWYM interface for their users editing content. Style sheet language A style sheet language , or style language , is a computer language that expresses the presentation of structured documents . One attractive feature of structured documents
525-426: The most attractive features of structured documents is that they can be reused in many contexts and presented in various ways on mobile phones, TV screens, speech synthesisers, and any other device which can be programmed to process them. Other meaning can be ascribed to text which isn't "structural" in quite the same sense as larger objects, but is still considered "document structure" because it expresses claims about
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#1732782487737550-415: The presentation. Modern versions of markup languages discourage such markup in favor of descriptive markup which is mapped to particular presentations via style sheets , a method pioneered by systems such as Scribe and FRESS . Different style sheets can be attached to any markup, semantic or presentational, to produce different presentations, although mapping an tag name "italic" to boldface presentation
575-518: The rules of the schema is commonly called "valid according to that schema". Some systems also support documents with component of arbitrary types and combinations, but still with syntactic rules for how those components are identified. Lie and Saarela noted the " Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) has pioneered the concept of structured documents", although earlier systems such as Scribe , Augment , and FRESS provided many structured-document features and capabilities, and SGML's offspring XML
600-480: The scope and nature or ontology of portions of a document, rather than instructions about its presentation. In the HTML fragment above, the <strong> element means that the enclosed text is emphatic. In visual terms this commonly rendered via bold, just like <b> ; but a speech interface would instead likely use voice inflection. The term semantic markup excludes markup like <b> which directly expresses no meaning other than an instruction to
625-454: The title of the document, the name of a section, the caption associated with a figure, or the name of an author; this would in turn allow one element, such as section headings, to be rendered as large bold text in one style sheet, or as red center justified text in another, without further manual intervention. More often than not, this requires the semantic structure of the document to be decided in advance before writing it. The editor also needs
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