yet another reason to hate wysiwyg
I read blogs through Google Reader because I follow more than 200 blogs and I couldn’t do that without using some kind of aggregation tool. One of the great benefits of using Reader is that all the blogs I read are equalized in design — every one is displayed in Google’s default Reader style, not the individual blog’s design. This gives every blog a very plain text feel.
One problem with this comes from blogs whose posts are in a rich-text format. Rich-text is usually created using a WYSIWYG editor which is where text in a blog post is style-able through a bunch of buttons above the post-field. If this still sounds unfamiliar, think of those buttons in your email program that visually indicate bold, italics, font size, color and face. These buttons are known as a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. When you edit text with these, you see the changes in your text area.
The alternative to this is a non-visual text editing system for blogs. When you style the text in your post with a non-visual editor, you’ll see the HTML code right inside your post. I understand this makes things messy for the non-code familiar but bear with me and I’ll show you the advantage. One quick detour:
In WordPress, you can turn off the Visual Editor (WYSIWYG) by clicking on your username in the upper-right-hand corner of the control panel. This takes you to your user profile. There, you can uncheck the box labeled “Use the visual editor when posting” like so…
(Remember to save your options.)
Okay, back to the problems with WYSIWYG. I apologize in advance for making an example of my friend’s blog but I know she’s not the coder and is interested in this kind of thing. Today, I ran across a post from a blog in Reader that had several stray question marks in it.
These question marks are caused when rich-text gets in your RSS feed. The extraneous questions marks represent those cute curly quotation marks or em dashes created in a rich-text editor. In plain text, quotation marks are a boring straight-up and down affair and em dashes are just two normal dashes.
What I think happened here is that my friend copy-and-pasted a post from Microsoft Word into her blog post’s textarea. Microsoft Word (which, predictably, always adds garbage to the code when you copy) colluded with her WYSIWYG editor to add tons of superfluous code to a short, simple post. Wanna see?
Even if you aren’t familiar with the code, you’ll see all those crazy font styles added just to that one post. You’ll even see this…
<meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId" /><meta content="Microsoft Word 12" name="Generator" /><meta content="Microsoft Word 12" name="Originator" />
…which tells me Word was involved. The cute curly quotation marks which look great in Word and even in the WYSIWYG view aren’t converted into HTML-safe characters. I don’t know why. So they come through the RSS feed into my Reader as garbage.
There are two solutions to this.
1) Don’t copy from Word. If you want to compose your posts offline, use a plain text application like TextEdit or Notepad. This will eliminate all the Word-created garbage code.
2) Turn off your WYSIWYG editor. This will eliminate excessive code created in your blog post.
You should be safe doing one or the other of these things but you could always do both.
I’ve previously written on style issues with WYSIWYG editors.
