WYSIWYG variations

WYSIWYG, is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed during editing appears very similar to the final output, which might be a printed document, web page, slide presentation or even the lighting for a theatrical event.

 

Many variations are used only to illustrate a point or make a joke, and have very limited real use. Some that have been proposed include:

 

1. WYSIMOLWYG, What You See Is More Or Less What You Get, recognizing that most WYSIWYG implementations are imperfect.
2. WYSIAYG, What You See Is All You Get, used to point out that a style of "heading" that refers to a specification of "Helvetica 15 bold" provides more useful information than a style of "Helvetica 15 bold" every time a heading is used. This is also what Doug Engelbart prefers to call WYSIWYG since he feels it limits possibilities by modeling what we can do on paper.
3. WYSIWYM, What You See Is What You Mean (You see what best conveys the message.)
4. WYCIWYG, What You Cache is What You Get. "wyciwyg://" turns up occasionally in the address bar of Gecko-based Web browsers like Mozilla Firefox when the browser is retrieving cached information. Unauthorized access to wyciwyg:// documents was fixed by Mozilla in Firefox version 2.0.0.5.
5. WYSYHYG, What You See You Hope You Get (/ˈwɪzihɪɡ/), a term ridiculing text mode word processing software; used in the Microsoft Windows Video Collection, a video distributed around 1991 on two VHS cassettes at promotional events.
6. WYSIWYS, What You See Is What You Sign, an important requirement for digital signature software. It means that the software has to be able to show you the content without any hidden content before you sign it.
7. WYSIWYW, What You See Is What You Want, used to describe GNU TeXmacs editing platform. The abbreviation clarifies that unlike in WYSIWYG editors, the user is able to customize WYSIWYW platforms to partly act as manual typesetting programs such as TeX or troff.
8. YAFIYGI, You Asked For It You Got It. A term used to describe a text-command oriented document editing system that does not include WYSIWYG, in reference to the fact that users of such systems often ask for something they didn't really want. Effectively the opposite of WYSIWYG. The phrase was first used in this context in 1983 in the essay Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal to describe the TECO text editor system, and began to be abbreviated circa 1993.