WYSIWYG

Thank god for the clarity that wiki offers...

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

WYSIWYG (pronounced "wizzy-wig" or "wuzzy-wig") is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, and is used in computing to describe a seamlessness between the appearance of edited content and final product. Today this is expected for word processors but in other situations, like web (HTML) authoring, this is not always the case.

Related acronyms (in order of increasing obscurity)

WYSIWIS - What You See Is What I See (used in context of distant multi-users applications, e.g. CSCW)
WYSIWYAF - What You See Is What You Asked For (in reference to programs such as those used for manual typesetting such as TeX or troff, that what is retrieved from the system is what the user specified - in essence, a statement of GIGO)
WYSIAYG - What You See Is All You Get (used by computer programmers who point out that a style of "heading" that refers to a specification of "Helvetica 15 bold" provides more useful information than a style of "Helvetica 15 bold" every time a heading is used)
WYSIAWYG - What You See Is Almost What You Get (most text editing programs)
WYSIWYM - What You See Is What You Mean (You see what best conveys the message)
WYSIMOLWYG - What You See Is More Or Less What You Get (another way of stating WYSIAWYG)
WYGINS - What You Get Is No Surprise - Weaker version of WYSIAWYG and WYSIMOLWYG
WYTYSIWYTYG - What You Think You See Is What You Think You Get ("whit-iss-ee-whit-ig") (when a program claims to be WYSIWYG but isn't)
WYCIWYG - What You Cache is What You Get ("wyciwyg://" turns up occasionally in the address bar of Gecko-based Web
browsers like Mozilla Firefox when the browser is retrieving cached information)
-or - What You Create Is What You Get -or- What You Click Is What You Get
WYPIWYF - What You Print is What You Fax, briefly popular in the early days of fax modems, to distinguish software that presented the fax modem to the OS via a printer driver and thus fax-enabled any program capable of printing
WYGIWYG - What You Get Is What You Get (an alternative approach to document formatting using markup languages, e.g. HTML, to define content and trusting the layout software to make it pretty enough)
WYGIWYGAINUC - What You Get Is What You're Given And It's No Use Complaining

To that list I humbly suggest, WTFDWBWAAFTS - Why The Fuck Did We Bother With An Acronym For This Shit, or maybe WYSIRFUBBHASTE - What You See Is Really Fucked Up Because Blogger Has A Shitty Text Editor. I like that one because it rolls off the tongue so easily, Why, Sir Fubb Haste! And here I thought we were retarded for refering to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius as AHWOSG.

PS - I apologize if there are spelling errors in this post, but there was no way in hell I was going to use a spell-checker and have to skip half the words!