WYSIWYG is a concept that pre-dates the web and what this article is talking about is not the same thing. WYSIWYG was coined as a term to describe word processing and desktop publishing software where the appearance of your text matched the final printed output; the same fonts, weights, sizes, styles, etc. That's it.

It's something we mostly take for granted today but was a real advancement over earlier, often text-based, programs that used simple text effects like highlighting or different colors to represent visual effects that were only fully realized when you printed your document.

It has nothing to do with being able to view source, or copy other designs, or any of that.

The term was later also extended to things like visual GUI builders, where the appearance in the editing interface matches the appearance of the final GUI (e.g. the Visual Basic form editor). This specific WYSIWYG variation mostly hasn't returned, unfortunately.

> It's something we mostly take for granted today but was a real advancement over earlier, often text-based, programs that used simple text effects like highlighting or different colors to represent visual effects that were only fully realized when you printed your document.

I am tasked with maintaining documentation in Confluence and Notion-and I wasn’t enjoying it. Then I built a system with bidirectional sync between the two of them and a Git repo full of Markdown documents-and now I find the task to be much more pleasant.

WYSIWYG came about when displays became bit-mapped graphics with a sufficient amount of dots per inch.

Previously, displays used a character generator ROM chip which mapped ASCII onto one character. For a terminal I designed and built in those days, I used an off-the-shelf character generator chip which had a 5x7 font.

The original IBM PC used a character generator.