Tom Smith’s: theOTHERblog

One man’s WYSIWYG……is another’s botch job.

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors are starting to replace textareas in web forms. The openwysiyg initiative makes it easy and cheap for all developer to use these tool.This in itself seems a good thing, many people find it easier using simple tools rather than having to remember, or refer to, funny {{IMG}} codes. I know I do, I’m using the Blog editor built into the Flock browser (see image) , it’s lovely and interfaces to Wordpress. But Wordpress has its own WYSIWYG editor too… as does Blogger… and despite them all working a little differently I tend to only use two or three buttons, bold, italic etc so the differences don’t matter.

Better tools help make better content. Because I have a nice editor, this article has a picture that helps explain what I’m talking about. If I had have been using a web form, if I’m honest, I wouldn’t have bothered. I added the the link above because it was quick and easy, if I’d have been using HTML you would have had to go and google for that yourself. Tools make us what we are, define the ways we think and communicate.

As part of the monkey code-a-thon we had to choose a CMS that had a certain list of features. The one we chose has a WYSIWYG editor, or at least, it looked like one. I discovered during its use that in fact it wasn’t one, it was a short-cut inserter for wiki-like syntax… ouch! Lesson learned… so, when looking at a CMS’s features you need to use the editor and ask of it these questions…

• 1. Media. Can you add a picture to your content that you haven’t uploaded yet? In Use Case terms this is one of the most common need when you are creating content… you write some stuff and think, I need a picture here and then most CMSs let you down. You can’t add a picture you haven’t added yet… and worse you then have to save the thing you are working on (you are probably half way through) and go and upload your picture and then add it where you want it. If you haven’t lost the will to live or at least the thread by then, you are super-human anyway. Case in point… as I was writing this I did a quick screen grab, dragged the picture onto my Flickr topbar and then into my post…

• 2. Media. Can you see the pictures you are working with?… a reference doesn’t cut it. If I was writing a CMS today I think I’d make sure it supported the Blogger XMLRPC API before I started making any content editing forms…. And I’d make sure I stored user-generated data in my own format so the html could always be parsed and verified…

• 3. Creation going forward. Can you link to something that you haven’t made yet? Again… this feature is intrinsic to wikis and yet normally missing in CMS… because they start from the wrong assumption. Content. Most CMSs think of content as a thing, an enitity on its own rather than as a piece of a larger whole. It’s sort of a western way of thinking really as opposed to a more eastern mindset. Content is wrongly seen as a collection of individuals rather than a community of interdependent items.

• 4.Context. Does the editor know anything? If you have created an article recently called “How to Train Your Duck”… then when adding a link are you reduced to knowing the URL or does the editor know what other content is in the system, what other content you are working on, what other content is nearby or relevent?

• 5. Linking going backward. Are you creating a dynamic static site? I’m always amazed by sites that have articles that link to other articles. In time, newer articles get created on the same subject and the earlier articles know nothing about them. Why is that? I guess this one is more about the back-end than the editor itself, but there is an interesting overflow between authored links and discovered links that I won’t go into here.

You’d be surprised how many fail on the criteria above. So… remember, when you are looking for a really usable CMS and it has what looks like a WYSIWYG editor, don’t be fooled. A bold and italic button do not a usable tool make. Get in there and actually use it, put it through the 5 steps above and see how it really performs, because, when it comes to interfaces, nice buttons really don’t matter, what you see is not as important as what you can do with it.