The answer to that last bit is that the people who make the browser want websites to look good on them, so they've allowed all sorts of malpractice to be rendered just fine. The answer to the rest of your question is, in part, that they're moving away from that line of thinking, and sites will need to be coded properly to display properly. Thus, old sites with funky WYSIWYG or hap-hazardly written code won't display correctly anymore.
For WYSIWYG-only users, it's generally hard to explain why code can be wrong when it appears to work just fine.
Thank you for the very detail explanation of your view point. If what you say is true, then my FP site (or any wysiwyg site) should soon stop working. I guess time will tell.
One statement you made allowed me to see into to the psychology behind your mentality though ("the future of our craft"). Most people who delve deeply into any craft, at some point, develop a sense of ownership of the craft as a whole and therefore become defensive to anyone who is less committed then they are. There are many examples of this mentality, but one that comes to mind is a scene from a movie called "A River Runs Through It". In the scene two fly fisherman are going trout fishing when they come upon a couple of other guys with some cheap rods and a can of worms. The two fly fisherman begin to mock and ridicule the guys with the cheap rods and worms as a couple of idiots that had no idea how to catch trout. Of course the movie goes on to show one of the fly fisherman catching a trout so big that it drags him down the river. So even the writers of the movie script were under the impression that fly fishing is the superior way to catch trout. But the truth is far from this.
I have fished for over forty years with nothing but a cheap Zebco 33 reel and worms and I have not once been beaten by a fly fisherman. Two years ago I was invited by a doctor friend of mine to go on a camping / fishing trip up in the mountains. There were seven of us total, including four guys that were devoted fly fisherman. Their rods alone cost no less then $700 a piece. They had their own hand tied ties, hip waders, the works. After we got to our camping spot and set up camp, we had a few hours of daylight left to fish. When these fly fisherman saw me pull out my Zebco 33 reel on a $20 telescopic rod out of my backpack, the laughing began. "Is that really what you brought to fish with!" "Your not serious are you?" After three hours of fishing the expert fly fisherman had caught two seven inch trout between them. I found some red worms and I caught twenty-two trout, the largest of of which was 24 inches long and weighed over five pounds. Guess who's trout those expert fly fishermen were eating that night?
We fished for four days and every day I caught five trout for every one that the expert fly fishermen caught. Do you think that one of those expert fly fishermen changed their opinion or tried fishing with worms like me? Not on your life! In spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they continued to talk about the superiority of fly fishing and how important the quality of the rod and the perfection of the fly is to being successful at the craft of trout fishing. Instead of admiring me for my skill, they looked at me with disdain and hatred as if my existence had some how corrupted the beautiful art of fly fishing. They were simply locked in a psychological box of cultural brainwashing and misinformation. They had bought so deeply into the lie that fly fishing is the superior way to catch trout and had invested so much time and money into it, that to consider any other option was unthinkable and anyone who was successful in any other way, was viewed as an enemy. Why? Because if someone could be highly successful at the same thing without investing the enormous resources they did, then that would mean that all their investment was unnecessary and it would make them look foolish for doing so.
Why did I tell you this story? Because, I want you to see into my mentality. I am not accustom to investing lot's of time, energy and resources into anything unnecessarily, if I can accomplish the same task in a much easier way (even if my way is viewed as "ugly and unprofessional").
You keep insisting that writing code is some how an advancement in web design technology. While I admit that it my be a more PRECISE way to write code (if your an expert, that is), I have a hard time believing that wysiwyg editors are as bad as you make out. When you want to type a letter on your computer, do you use a text editor like MS Word or OpenOffice? Or do you go back to writing binary code? I am going to take an educated guess and say that you use a text editor. How is that different from choosing a to use a wysiwyg editor to create a website over writing code? I bet writing binary code is a more precise way to write a letter too.
Listen, I came here looking for a recommendation on a wysiwyg editor to replace FP with. That is the help I came here looking for. My opening statement ("
I know I am painting a huge bulls-eye on myself by asking this question") was intended to inform any reader with reading comprehension that, I have already been down this road before. With that opening statement, I was hoping to avoid this whole WYSIWYG vs Code Writing debate for the hundredth time. The problem is that apparently, there are no avid wysiwyg users on this forum, because they were either ridiculed into leaving or converted to code writing to avoid embarrassment. So there is no one here that can help me. I anticipated this might be the case and that concluded my OP with the closing statement , "
This may be the wrong place to ask this question, and if it is, would kindly point me in the right direction." If any of you would have read and respected that last statement, we could have avoided this entire debate.
It is not your fault that you cannot offer me the help I came here seeking, no more then it is my fault for not being to teach you how to write code. I know what I know and you know what you know. I can't tell you what I don't know and you can't tell me don't know. I don't believe a single person that has commented on this thread so far has given a wysiwyg editor more then a casual glance at, and probably with the sole purpose of trying to find out how it is not as good as writing code. I have no doubt that you guys may have had to fix sites that were made with wysiwyg editor and your impression of them is primarily derived from these nightmarish experiences. But anyone can make a site with a wysiwyg editor and has it ever dawned on you that the majority of the mistakes might have been user error. No matter how smart a program might be, it cannot compensate for complete stupidity (and neither can code writing).
You will never convince me that writing code is the more advanced way to build a website, when I can guarantee you that all of you use text editors, image editors, video editors, audio editors etc. etc. etc, and that none of you routinely write code to perform any of these task. And in spite of this obvious contradiction in your own behavior, you wil die tying to convince me that write code to make a web page is the new advanced way to do things.
I am sorry I wasted your time. The is the Jungle Explorer signing off.