I've always wanted a DWIMNWIS code editor: "Do What I Mean, Not What I Say". These days it's likely that AI at least tries to provide this.
An Ode to the Return of Wysiwyg
11–20 of 33 posts
Re: An Ode to the Return of Wysiwyg
#12WYSIWYG is a concept that pre-dates the web and what this article is talking about is not the same thing. WYSIWYG was coined as a term to describe word processing and desktop publishing software where the appearance of your text matched the final printed output; the same fonts, weights, sizes, styles, etc. That's it. It's something we mostly take for granted today but was a real advancement over earlier, often text-b…
> It's something we mostly take for granted today but was a real advancement over earlier, often text-based, programs that used simple text effects like highlighting or different colors to represent visual effects that were only fully realized when you printed your document.
I am tasked with maintaining documentation in Confluence and Notion-and I wasn’t enjoying it. Then I built a system with bidirectional sync between the two of them and a Git repo full of Markdown documents-and now I find the task to be much more pleasant.
Re: An Ode to the Return of Wysiwyg
#13WYSIWYG is a concept that pre-dates the web and what this article is talking about is not the same thing. WYSIWYG was coined as a term to describe word processing and desktop publishing software where the appearance of your text matched the final printed output; the same fonts, weights, sizes, styles, etc. That's it. It's something we mostly take for granted today but was a real advancement over earlier, often text-b…
The term was later also extended to things like visual GUI builders, where the appearance in the editing interface matches the appearance of the final GUI (e.g. the Visual Basic form editor). This specific WYSIWYG variation mostly hasn't returned, unfortunately.
Re: An Ode to the Return of Wysiwyg
#14No mention of Geocities?!
Read it again.
Re: An Ode to the Return of Wysiwyg
#15> The barrier to entry is lower than it’s ever been. I don't see a web full of projects created by people who aren't technical. A substantial number of young people grew up on phones and iPads and might not even understand filesystems well enough to have the imagination to create things like this. So the power exists, but the people who are taking best advantage to me seem like the people who were building stuff befo…
> I don't see a web full of projects created by people who aren't technical. Sure, but this is very new technology. It will take some time for the idea of building software easily to seep into the public consciousness. In that time, AI will get better and the barrier to entry will get even lower. For comparison, the internet has been around in some form since the 1960s (more-or-less: depending on the exact technology…
So the internet is newer than AI?
Re: An Ode to the Return of Wysiwyg
#16WYSIWYG is a concept that pre-dates the web and what this article is talking about is not the same thing. WYSIWYG was coined as a term to describe word processing and desktop publishing software where the appearance of your text matched the final printed output; the same fonts, weights, sizes, styles, etc. That's it. It's something we mostly take for granted today but was a real advancement over earlier, often text-b…
WYSIWYG came about when displays became bit-mapped graphics with a sufficient amount of dots per inch.
Previously, displays used a character generator ROM chip which mapped ASCII onto one character. For a terminal I designed and built in those days, I used an off-the-shelf character generator chip which had a 5x7 font.
The original IBM PC used a character generator.
Re: An Ode to the Return of Wysiwyg
#17Back in the bad old days, people created websites because they had no choice in the matter. You simply had to do that to share anything with the rest of the world. Most of the tools we had back then still exist. The barrier to entry has never been lower, and those that are motivated to tinker do just that. But going through history... once mainstream blogging became a thing, and then social media conquered all, the m…
> those same monsters that destroyed the world we knew through monetizing everything
That's why we get to use google for free.
I use a ton of excellent free software.
Re: An Ode to the Return of Wysiwyg
#18This is slop.
Re: An Ode to the Return of Wysiwyg
#19This is slop.
We're becoming NPCs who publish what the AI writes about the AI creating web sites.
Re: An Ode to the Return of Wysiwyg
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't see a web full of projects created by people who aren't technical. Sure, but this is very new technology. It will take some time for the idea of building software easily to seep into the public consciousness. In that time, AI will get better and the barrier to entry will get even lower. For comparison, the internet has been around in some form since the 1960s (more-or-less: depending on the exact technology…
So the internet is newer than AI?
The internet is older than LLMs.