WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used of text editors and word processors that give an almost perfect rendition of the final copy during the editing stage.

In web terms this is important as in the early days code had to be hand written and it was only once the page was viewed in a web browser that you could see content properly. Nowadays there a number of very sophisticated HTML editors which, like a word processor, turn the code behind it into the text and numbers we understand and makes web pages much easier to update.