You’re probably using one right now. Honestly, you almost certainly are. Whether you are typing a quick email in Gmail, dragging a block around in Squarespace, or just bolding a word in a Slack message, you are interacting with a concept that changed the world in the late 70s and early 80s: WYSIWYG. It stands for "What You See Is What You Get." It sounds simple, right? It’s basically the idea that the thing you see on your screen while you’re creating something will look exactly like the final product, whether that’s a printed page, a live website, or a PDF.
Before this, life was a nightmare of code.
Imagine typing a document but seeing nothing but raw text and weird backslashes. You’d type something like \b to make a word bold, then you’d just have to hope it looked right when the printer finally spit it out twenty minutes later. There was no visual feedback. It was a guessing game. Then came Xerox PARC. Then came the Apple Macintosh. Suddenly, if you made a word big and curvy on the screen, it stayed big and curvy on the paper. This shift didn't just make things easier; it democratized design. It meant you didn’t need to be a computer scientist to write a professional-looking newsletter.
The Messy Reality of What You See Is What You Get
But here is the thing: WYSIWYG is kind of a lie. Or at least, it's a very polite exaggeration.
In the early days of desktop publishing, the "What You See" part was locked to a specific printer. If you had a Bravo editor (the first real WYSIWYG word processor developed at Xerox PARC by Butler Lampson and Charles Simonyi), what you saw was calibrated for a specific laser printer. Today? It’s way more chaotic. You might be designing a website on a 27-inch 4K monitor, but your user is looking at it on a cracked iPhone screen in direct sunlight. The "What You Get" part is now a moving target.
This is where the term "headless" starts popping up in tech circles. Developers often complain that WYSIWYG editors produce "dirty code." If you've ever copied a paragraph from Microsoft Word and pasted it into a website builder, you know the horror. You get fifteen hidden tags, weird font styling that won't go away, and a layout that breaks the moment you look at it funny. This happens because the software is trying so hard to mimic the visual look that it sacrifices the underlying structure.
Why we can't quit the visual editor
Despite the code bloat, we love these tools. Why? Because the human brain is visual.
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Most people don't think in nested HTML tags. We think in layouts. We think in "I want this picture next to this text." Tools like Elementor, Wix, and even the "Gutenberg" editor in WordPress have doubled down on the WYSIWYG philosophy because it lowers the barrier to entry. It’s about empowerment. If you can move a mouse, you can build a business online. That’s a powerful thing, even if the "What You Get" part varies slightly between Chrome and Safari.
There’s a specific psychological comfort in it. It's called direct manipulation. When you click a slider and the image gets brighter immediately, your brain registers a sense of control. Contrast that with writing a line of code, saving it, refreshing a browser, and realizing you forgot a semicolon. One feels like art; the other feels like homework.
The Xerox Legacy and the Rise of the GUI
We really owe it all to the Alto. The Xerox Alto was the first computer to support an operating system based on a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Before the Alto, you were looking at green text on a black background. Larry Tesler, a legendary computer scientist who worked at Xerox and later Apple, was a huge proponent of the "no modes" philosophy. He actually had a license plate that read "NO MODES." He hated the idea that a user had to enter a specific "mode" to edit text versus viewing it.
He wanted the screen to be a constant, living document.
When Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC in 1979—the famous visit that changed computing history—he saw the WYSIWYG paradigm and lost his mind. He realized that this was the future of the personal computer. It led directly to the Lisa and the Macintosh. If you ever used an early Mac, you remember the "ImageWriter" printer. It was noisy and slow, but it was revolutionary because the fonts on the screen actually matched the dots on the page. That was the birth of the modern era.
The Problem With Modern Web Builders
Fast forward to 2026. We are in a weird spot.
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Software like Webflow tries to bridge the gap. It’s a WYSIWYG tool, but it forces you to understand CSS logic. It’s basically "What You See Is What You Get" for people who actually care about how the "Get" is built.
The struggle is real.
- Responsive Design: You have to design for five different screen sizes at once.
- Accessibility: A visual editor might look great to a sighted user but be a total disaster for a screen reader if the "What You Get" doesn't include proper alt-text and semantic headers.
- Performance: All those drag-and-drop features add "weight" to a page, making it load slower.
So, is WYSIWYG dying? No. It’s just evolving. We’re moving toward "What You See Is What You Mean." Instead of just mimicking pixels, modern editors are trying to understand the intent behind the design.
Real-World Examples of WYSIWYG Today
Let's look at some heavy hitters that define this space right now.
- Canva: This is the ultimate "What You See Is What You Get" success story. It stripped away the complexity of Adobe Photoshop and gave people a canvas. What you see on that canvas is exactly what your Instagram post looks like. It’s so successful it’s basically become the default language of social media design.
- Notion: It’s a hybrid. It uses "blocks." It’s sort of a WYSIWYG, but it has constraints. You can't just drag a text box to a random coordinate on the screen. This constraint actually makes the "What You Get" part more reliable across devices.
- Google Docs: The modern typewriter. It’s so seamless we don’t even think about it as a WYSIWYG editor anymore, but it is. The pagination, the margins, the font sizes—it’s all a visual representation of a physical piece of paper.
Is it actually better than Markdown?
A lot of writers (and developers) prefer Markdown. Markdown is the opposite of WYSIWYG in a way. You type # Heading and it represents a heading, but you don't see the big bold letters until you hit "preview."
It feels faster. It keeps your hands on the keyboard.
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But for the general public? Markdown is scary. People want to see the change happen in real-time. They want that hit of dopamine when the "Publish" button shows them exactly what they spent three hours tweaking.
Actionable Steps for Navigating the WYSIWYG World
If you are a business owner or a creator, you need to know how to handle these tools without letting them ruin your project. You can’t just trust the screen blindly.
Don't trust the desktop view alone. Always, always toggle the "mobile" view in your editor. Most WYSIWYG tools like Wix or Squarespace have this. Just because it looks like a masterpiece on your MacBook doesn't mean it isn't a garbled mess on a Galaxy S21.
Clean your code. If you are moving text from one tool to another, use "Paste and Match Style" (Cmd+Shift+V or Ctrl+Shift+V). This strips out the "invisible" formatting that WYSIWYG editors love to hide. It prevents your website from inheriting 40 different font styles you didn't ask for.
Check for accessibility.
Visual editors are notorious for skipping over things like H1 tags or image descriptions. Use a tool like WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool) to check what the "What You Get" actually looks like to a search engine or a blind user.
Understand the trade-off. If you choose a high-end WYSIWYG builder, you are trading site speed for ease of use. It’s a valid trade, but you should be aware of it. If your site takes 10 seconds to load because your visual editor added a massive JavaScript library, the "What You Get" won't matter because nobody will stay long enough to see it.
The concept of WYSIWYG is about the removal of friction. It’s the bridge between a human thought and a digital reality. While it has its flaws—mainly in the technical "messiness" it can create—it remains the most important interface discovery of the last fifty years. It turned computers from machines for mathematicians into tools for artists, writers, and entrepreneurs. Just remember to check the mobile preview before you hit send.