Is there any way to permanently disable the WYSIWYG editor?

[pocaracas]

So is this industry standard or peculiar to this software?

Industry standard.
Works on HTML, and the forum operates by generating HTML.

Works on other computer graphics software.... but sometimes, they'll use different color bit-depths.
The normal, for JPEGs and PNG files is the 24 bit color I explained above. 24 bits = 3x8bytes.
PNGs have an extra byte (8 bits), for an overall total of 32bit colors, but the extra byte is only taking care of the transparency level, where, if my memory serves me right, FF corresponds to an opaque color and 00 to a fully transparent color.
For example: FF0000FF is the standard blue, 80FF0000 is a half transparent red, 00FFFFFF is a fully transparent black

GIF files work with a 256 color palette, and some of those can be transparent, so the encoding is different.

On photoshop (and other image manipulation programs), you can increase the color bit-depth of an image, so you can have 12 or 16 bits per color, instead of the normal 8-bits, but the standard person isn't sensitive to these gradations.