WYSIWYG means “what-you-see-is-what-you-get”
Thats an internet fact.
Basically this means that when you type into a comment box on a website you want to be able to click bold italic and underline and actually see the words changing on the screen – as opposed to entering all the geeky <strong> <italic> and <ul> codes.
Why isnt a simple WYSIWIG editor included in Drupal?
Dont ask me! It was one of the main reasons that I (very nearly) selected Joomla over Drupal many many moons ago. Hopefully something will be included with the upcoming Drupal7 – if your running Droop5 or 6 (it’s 6 on this website) then the chances are that you will using one of the many add-on wysiwig editor modules that are available.
Love em or hate em – WYSIWIG is web2.0 and it’s here to stay.
As i type this – FCKEditor or BUEDITOR are my two main choices. TinyMCE comes in a close second but it’s fiddly to install (so gets a bit of a thumbdown from me. But, saying that, this GUI editing area is evolving so rapidaly I dareway that if you are reading this a year from now my choice could be wildly different.