Stuff thats Broken: WYSIWYG Editors

This comment started me thinking about GUI design again:

This incident strikes me as a glaring example of how broken web design is.

A simple page like that should be easier and faster to create from scratch using a WYSIWYG tool, and then publish to a web platform that support it…. than copying the source and then editing it in a text editor.

I know in the past such WYSIWYG tools were too rigid and thus we have a generation of designers that work in text…. but it just seems so archaic to me.

Like building images with text, rather than using photoshop. — nirvana on hn

I completely agree with nirvana. Just think about it. Web designers still have code their designs, the existing WYSIWSG editors pretty much suck and make the process more difficult than writing HTML code with a text editor.

Imagine a world where this whole process of slicing, coding and cross-browser testing won’t exist anymore. This would be pretty awesome. Just create your design in Photoshop, export the .psd file into the application and specify the behavior of the resulting html file, possibly with customization for various template engines like WordPress, Drupal, RoR or Django. That would be awesome. The resulting code should be small and work on all current browsers.

I saw some auto-generated html code and often it’s pretty terrible. Why not start off with simple grid frameworks and define semantic elements a priori. Most websites share common elements like content, navigation, a footer or info boxes.

That’s one thing I’d love to see, so if somebody want to accept the challenge, go ahead!