--- layout: default title: About the Project ---

About the WYMeditor Project

The WYMeditor project was started in 2005 as an effort to build a better tool for content creation and publishing in the browser. By adopting the What You See Is What You Mean approach, WYMeditor puts back the focus on the content – where it belongs – leaving a designer figure out the presentation.

Background

Back in 2005 more or less all WYSIWYG editors tried to emulate Microsoft Word making them heavy, slow and hard to use. Most users simply got bogged down in the presentation or caught up in weird bugs, taking away focus from whats really important – the content.

On top of that, these editors generated crappy markup which made it hard (not to say impossible) to get a consistent appearance across browsers or to use the content anywhere outside a browser.

All these things added together was enough for Jean-François Hovinne and Daniel Reszka to set out to build a better editor – WYMeditor was born.

What You See Is What You Mean

The WYSIWYM principles are at the heart of WYMeditor and has several advantages over classical WYSIWYG editing.

Simplicity

By leaving out support for most presentational features both the editor user interface as well as the internals could be greatly simplifyed.

Semantics

WYSIWYM makes it easy to create content that is easily understood by both humans and machines, which is great for SEO and content portability.

Content Portability

The generated markup is free from presentational cruft and valid XHTML, which makes it easy to write content once and use it everywhere (on websites, RSS-feeds, mobile apps, etc.)