WYSIWYM

WYSIWYM /ˈwɪziwɪm/ (an acronym for "what you see is what you mean") 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 a formatted document on screen as it will appear in only one mode of presentation.

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, leaving its final appearance up to one or more separate style sheets. For example, in a WYSIWYM document a human being manually marks text as the title of the document, the name of a section, 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 human intervention. This requires the semantic structure of the document to be decided on before writing it. The editor also needs 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 presentation and content: users can structure and write the document once, rather than repeatedly altering it for each mode of presentation, which is left to the export system.

Unlike a fixed-presentation unstructured document, a document processor rather than a word processor must be used for WYSIWYM. The first document processor which articulated itself through WYSIWYM term was LyX document processor although similar concepts can be traced back to much earlier publishing systems like TPS, itself modelled on pioneering experiments at Xerox PARC, the most popular probably being FrameMaker.

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