Zen-White-Paper: Critique of current WYSIWYM web-page composers

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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.

WYMeditor

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.

Zen-White-Paper: Values

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The values driving Zen’s development are:

Creating novel, beautiful, well-formatted, semantic HTML and CSS should be dead simple.
Amateur web authors should easily create virtually any page structure and style.
The interface should have a virtually zero learning curve, and zero should mean zero. Zen must leverage well-known interface metaphors and gestures to the hilt. The “principle of least surprise” should be followed.
Zen should not clutter its interface for manipulating and creating semantic and presentation structure with every possible detail. Zen should hide details until they are needed; it is better to let the user drill down to these details than to present them by default.
The interface should have two mutually exclusive modes for semantics and styling. The semantics mode should hide page styling information and help search engines “understand” the page’s subject matter to classify it for the sake of web seekers. Styles will set fonts and colors and the interaction of the page’s elements with other elements and with the height and width of the page.
The interface should have two mutually exclusive modes: a semantics mode and a styling mode. The semantics mode should hide page styling information. The styles will set the looks of the page and the interaction of the page’s elements with such things as other elements and the height and width of the page. each other and the The clear and proper semantic structure will help search engines “understand” the page’s subject matter to classify it. The other mode should hide the semantics and focus on the look and feel of the web page. The look and feel is
Meta organization, like themes, templates, or partials,²⁸ ^,²⁹ ^,³⁰ ^,³¹ ^,³² ^,³³ ^,³⁴ should not be precluded by the structure of Zen’s low-level tools. Zen should empower the creation of these, even if not directly implement them.

doc.mashweb.club – structure

Zen-White-Paper: Critique of current WYSIWYM web-page composers

WYMeditor

Zen-White-Paper: Values