You see these WYSIWYG things all over the place, in fact, I’m typing in one right now. They are supposed to allow for an easy web based solution to providing rich content; basically something above and beyond just entering text. WYSIWYG (pronounced wisy-wig) stands for What You See Is What You Get, but it’s more often the case that What You See Is Something U Can’t have, but WYSISUC doesn’t roll of the tongue the same way. This is a source of constant Consternation for internet users.
It’s the classic case of “If you can’t do it right, don’t do it at all,” but most web products don’t see it that way. They usually figure what they have is good enough. The problem is that good enough for one person, isn’t even close to good enough for everyone. The usual solution to this problem is just to not use the tool at all. Too bad that’s not an option with the version of wordpress that I use. I guess that means I just need to write a plug-in. 
I don’t mean to knock WP, it’s a great tool, but for those of you who get HTML, you can see by the image here, that this stuff isn’t always quite right. I was able to set it right, but how would some one without years of HTML experience guess at how I fixed this?
So what’s the answer? Well, these things have come a long way, and they are getting better all the time, but it’s important to remember that you need to provide the user with alternatives. Maybe this tool won’t suffice. If that’s the case, how can they work around it? What alternatives will you provide? Just remember that your user isn’t always the same person. Because if you forget that then you’ll end up driving away everyone else.
