When I was younger I used to get spam in the mail with things like free tickets to nightclubs for me and twenty friends. Offers of holidays on Greek islands, loans to buy fast cars, discounted subscriptions to racy magazines. Today I received spam from the Automobile Club with an offer of free luggage. Free brown luggage. And I thought, I actually thought ooh that looks nice. So is this it? Is this life from now on? Steak knives, carriage clocks, matching his’n‘hers luggage and a teasmaid? Before you know it I’ll be ordering an ornamental plate from the back of the Radio Times and investing in caravan holidays. Bah.

Anyway, over the last couple of days I’ve been working away on a website content administration tool, making use of the rather wonderful XStandard WYSIWYG ActiveX editor. If you’re in the same line of work as me, you’ll want to take a look at XStandard. It’s the only tool of its kind I’ve found yet which outputs code I’m okay with. It’s fully XHTML, CSS and Accessibility tooled, and very configurable. One rather charming aspect of XStandard is that it point-blank refuses to load any data unless it is well-formed XHTML – we made friends instantly. It even has a simulated screen reader preview built in. The downside is that it relies on ActiveX, so you do have to know your audience, but for admin pages in a PC-based company, that was no problem for me.

The problem with WYSIWYG is that not only is it a pain in the butt to type (I literally have to say the words in my head), but it usually spells a free ticket for content authors and twenty of their friends to run amuck on your website. It offers them a weird sense of control, which, in reality, is merely evidence of the very lack of control. When the prisoners have control, the screws do not. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. I could go on.

It struck me that What You See Is What You Get is not dissimilar from the Latin phrase caveat emptor or as we like to translate it, buyer beware. Beware – what you see is what you get. The question is, do you really want it?