WYSIWYG stands for “What You See Is What You Get.” It describes a way of editing documents in which the screen shows the work exactly as it will appear when finished, with the real fonts, sizes, spacing, and layout, rather than as raw text peppered with formatting codes. The writer manipulates the finished-looking page directly, and there is no separate compile-or-preview step to find out what the output will look like.
The approach was born at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center on the Alto computer in the 1970s, in an editor called Bravo. The Computer History Museum records that “BRAVO is widely regarded as the first ‘What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get’ (WYSIWYG) text editor, showing on the screen exactly how the page would appear when printed.” Running on the Alto’s high-resolution bitmapped display, Bravo could show varied fonts and styles on the screen itself, which was a radical departure from the character-only terminals of the day.
WYSIWYG stands in deliberate contrast to the markup-and-compile model. In a markup workflow, the author writes text interleaved with tags or commands and then runs a program to produce the formatted result. WYSIWYG hides the markup entirely: the formatting lives in the document but is presented as appearance, not as visible codes, so the user edits the look directly. Each style has its strengths, and the tension between them, direct visual editing versus explicit structural markup, runs through the whole history of document tools.
The idea reached a mass audience through the personal computer. The Apple Macintosh, with its bitmapped screen and graphical interface, brought WYSIWYG editing to ordinary users, and applications such as word processors and page-layout programs made on-screen formatting the expectation rather than the exception. Charles Simonyi, one of the people behind Bravo at PARC, later carried the approach into Microsoft’s word processing software.
WYSIWYG transformed who could produce professional-looking documents. Before it, formatted output was the domain of typesetters and of users willing to learn markup commands. After it, anyone who could see the page could shape it. The trade-off, still felt today, is that hiding the structure can also hide meaning: a WYSIWYG document may look correct while carrying no semantic markup underneath, which is one reason structured and semantic formats continue to matter alongside visual editing.