What Is What You See Is All You Get (WYSIAYG)?

What you see is what you get? It's a simple concept what you see on the screen is what you'll get when it gets printed out or produced in another form of media? It's a familiar phrase and not just limited to the commercial world. It's also used in everyday life. If you're looking at a picture of your friend, and they've captioned it, "I'm going to be a famous dancer," then you can rest assured that when they become famous, they'll still look like that silly kid in the picture. You can also use this phrase to talk about something that isn't real. For example: if someone tells you they're going to buy an elephant at the zoo, but then they show up with a squirrel instead? That's WYSIWYG! What You See is a phrase that describes a computer interface that shows the user what the final product will look like is are working on it. It's one of the essential concepts in computing and web publishing because it allows people who aren't developers to create their websites without having to learn HTML or CSS code. The term WYSIWYG was coined by an engineer named Larry Sinclair, who used the phrase to describe the recently invented prepress typesetting machine's page layout function, in which what the user saw on the screen was just what they got. The term was then popularized in the late 1970s by editors Arlene and Jose Ramos, who published a newsletter called WYSIWYG for the prepress industry. WYSIWYG is especially popular when it comes to web publishing. By working in a program with WYSIWYG functionality, a user does not have to know HTML to publish an HTML document. Instead, using such an application feels more like a word processor than a development application. Just about any modern blogging application has a WYSIWYG interface.