Behind the scenes, the HTML markup can differ wildly.
The content may look fine in the editor, but behind the scenes it could be slowing down the website or, in some cases, breaking the layout. Often the HTML output by a WYSIWYG editor is bloated and not as clean as what a developer or SEO expert would want. None picked up the typeface or color - this is probably good, but inconsistent with expected results. The others seem to have added extra spaces. Although the line spacing was only respected by the MailChimp editor. This is expected, but also can create a problem if you demand pixel-perfect precision between what you see in the admin and what you see when published. One thing to note in these example is that their appearance in the locations where they are published (e.g., on web pages or in emails) will differ depending on the site or platform’s styles. See the following example of content pasted from Word into various platforms’ WYSIWYG editors. This process can produce unexpected results. When the content is pasted in, all the rich text formatting needs to be converted to HTML. This content is then pasted into a WYSIWYG editor for web publishing. Usually, content is composed in desktop word processing software like Microsoft Word. The most common issue is with pasting rich text into a WYSIWYG editor. Each browser, and browser version, can exhibit different rendering quirks that will affect the look and output of the WYSIWYG content. This is why editing content with a WYSIWYG editor in Internet Explorer may have a different set of issues than editing the content in say Firefox or Chrome. The browser, where the tools used to power the WYSIWYG editor (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) can all be slightly different depending on your operating system and browser platform. That last bit is important: all in the browser. Most problems stem from the fact that WYSIWYG editors are ultimately outputting HTML and using JavaScript to allow editing - all in the browser. Inherent Issues with Editing HTML in a Browser Some of these problems are visible to the average user, some of them only nerdy developers will notice, but all affect the performance of your content and online marketing channels such as your industrial website or email marketing program. However, in practice they can cause problems ranging from minor and annoying to serious and content breaking. Tons of popular online marketing platforms use them too, including Act-On, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Marketo, etc. Most popular content management systems use a WYSIWYG editor for editing main text content, including Drupal, WordPress, Magento, and SilverStripe, to name a few. They translate rich text content to HTML for display on a webpage. They include features for editing and formatting such as bolding text, underlining, italics, creating hyperlinks, lists, tables, and often many more. They are meant to present users with a familiar text editing interface similar to Microsoft Word or other word processing software.
W hat Y ou S ee I s W hat Y ou G et (WYSIWYG) is the term often used to refer to online rich text editors. Plain text contains no formatting, only line breaks, text, and spacing never images, tables, lists, etc. Rich text is the format used by word processing software. Rich text format is text that can be formatted with fonts, sizes, colors, bold, italics, images, tables, lists, etc.
Rich Text and Plain Textįirst you need to understand the difference between rich text and plain text. We’ll cover some of the major reasons why and offer a few tips for dealing effectively with rich text editing on the web. However, the sad truth is that most WYSIWYG editors are awful. The go-to solution for these groups is typically a rich text editor similar to Microsoft Word, often called a WYSIWYG editor.
SEO mavens want clean semantic HTML markup. By Brian Matthews Posted on 7 minute readĬontent creators want an easy way to edit and style text.