WYSIWYM

It is an adjunct to the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) paradigm, which displays the result of a formatted document as it will appear on screen or in print—without showing the descriptive code underneath.

The main advantage of this system is the total separation of content and presentation: users can structure and write the document once, rather than repeatedly alternating between the two modes of presentation—an approach which comes with its own switch cost.

These elements can then be exported to corresponding tags which preserve some or all of their functionality in a markup language such as XML/HTML/CSS and PDF, or directly rendered down for final presentation in anything from PostScript to raw text.

A different approach to the WYSIWYM philosophy is taken by GNU TeXmacs, which combines the on-screen representation of the document structure with an almost-faithful WYSIWYG rendering.

[citation needed] Such fixed-presentation HTML generators have been criticized, primarily because of the bloatedness and low quality of their code,[8][9][10] and there are voices advocating for changes to the WYSIWYM model.