Do you often go back to look at work you abandoned and find yourself amazed at just how good it was? That has just happened to me.

Before I got back into WordPress I was looking for a CMS to use as a platform for a web design business; i.e. the back end that would come with all the sights I produced. I tried Drupal, Joomla, and pretty much every other open source system out there and found them all to be very poor.

What I wanted was a CMS that was really, actually, easy and intuitive to use, and didn’t just slap those words on a massively overcomplicated pile of jargon. I didn’t consider WordPress to be CMSy enough. I had experience but discounted it.

Long story short, I decided to write my own CMS using superficially similar processes to WordPress but handmade and, as part of that, I decided to revolutionise WYSIWYG editors. Not small task for one man. You can see why I never finished it right?

My plan was to create a What You Mean Is What You Get editor, a semantic authoring tool that didn’t rely on any browsers in built design mode. I build my own replacement document object model that could be simply and easily expanded to use blocks of semantic code. To enforce the semantic nature of the editor I intended to save the content twice. Once as JSON that could be loaded back into the editor, and once as HTML that would be used as part of the output.