WYSIWYG (pronounced /ˈwɪziwɪg/ or /ˈwɪzɪwɪg/), is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. Popular WYSIWYG editors include Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Expression Web (formerly Microsoft FrontPage).
A WYSIWYG editor has a user interface that allows the web designer to see a result very similar to what their website will look like on a web browser. Often, they also include tools that allows a web designer to create a webpage with little or no HTML knowledge, using visual tools. While this can be a good way to put together a page quickly, the code that is produced is often bloated, does not validate, and on some tools, is all table based.
NOTE: Why YWSIWYG editors often have their own rendering engines for displaying your website, be sure to still check it in actual web browsers, to see how the page actually renders. There are times when WYSIWYG editors can be horribly off.
Free WYSIWYG Editors?
For many years, in order to get a good WYSIWYG editor, a web designer would have to buy one of the many commercial packages on the market. In 2005, Daniel Glazman released NVU Version 1. NVU is an open-soruce WYSIWYG editor that is based on the Mozilla Composer source code. It has many of the same features of the popular commercial products, and based on my own personal tests, seems to generate more standard compliant code than Dreamweaver or Expression Web. NVU is a popular choice for web designers and developers looking for a powerful tool for free. As great of a tool as NVU is, it has been discontinued with some bugs going unresolved. For some users, these bugs are a deal breaker, and prevented them from using NVU as their primary development tool.
After NVU was discontinued, Kompozer was created. it uses NVU as a code base, and aims to improve and fix NVU. If you are deciding between one of these two products, you should pick Kompozer, as it is more up-to-date, and has not been officially discontinued (as of this writing), which means there can and probably will still be more future versions released.
If you are new to web design, or just want to try a new tool, I suggest checking out Kompozer (and perhaps NVU). It’s a pretty good tool for HTML and CSS, though doesn’t always play as well with server-side scripting as some commercial products.
Feel free to share your experiences with NVU, Kompozer, or another open-source WYSIWYG editor.
