[thelist] Opinions and Comments on Browser Embedded WYSIWYG Editors (WAS Aren't we forgetting a user group in our CSS? Idea:EditorStylesheet)

Christian Heilmann codepo8 at gmail.com
Wed Sep 21 09:54:19 CDT 2005


> Not to hijack the original thread; adding my comments to a new one.
> 
> > Not sure what was hijacked, not on the other list anymore...
> 
> I share your feelings.

I ammeded the post on the blog, it should be more obvious now.
http://www.wait-till-i.com/index.php?p=162
 
> > I agree, but with a bit of work you can make some editors produce half
> > decent code, fckEditor was installed on this site and it validates
> > fairly well, (not perfectly):
> I have not observed but i think it is possibly done via a filter
> function that cleans up the irrelevant markup.

A lot of these editors also do some simple regexp replacement or run
the final output through tidy.

I wouldn't call fckEditor, TinyMCE or Xstandard WYSIWYG editors, I
would call them rich text editors. WYSIWYG implies whole page layout,
not only text structure / display.

> Another point of discussion may be the suitability and necessity of
> wysiwyg for a web page. Or to state in other words, will it be better
> to use textareas along with BBCode and leave the template-management
> and wysiwyg stuff to application packages like contribute, as Chris
> has suggested.

Personally I love Textile, but user testing in house and on the client
sides made us realise quickly that non-technical users are just not
adapting those. They want to use rich text applications, that is also
why you get so many HTML emails from outlook users and why every web
based mail has a rich text client.

It is a matter of training, but training is also always a matter of
budget. As Vlad pointed out in the comments, WYSIWYG editors could
also be responsible for bad, visual dependent text "click the options
on the left to continue". A good, valid point in favour of structural
rather than visual editors I will try out on colleagues as soon as I
get the chance.
 
> Cleaning out the mess a browser produces is kinda overkill, imho.

True, but what we have to live with is a heritage of products and
tutorials selling web sites as something you can paint. Frontpage, old
Dreamweaver, Pagemill, Homestead page generator and and and made sure
that the semantics of the web that are obvious to us developers are
completely alien to the average user. How many properly structured
Word documents do you get? And how many that don't use the heading
styles but got a colour and increased font size for headings?

> Anyway, I'll play with my DOM-based editor thingy for fun and
> learning. May be I come up with something that no-one has tried and
> become a millionaire :P
> Just kidding. But if you don't try anything new, then you don't learn
> anything. isn't it?

Yes, but there are many good editors out there, probably it'll be more
fruitful to participate in a project than reboot again.
Also, it would help to get to know the audience before developing a
tool that works to our values and ideas, but doesn't get used. We
bought a Java based Wiki system here, which uses BBedit, and after 2
months of installation and configuration it got more or less
discarded, as project managers, business analysts and administration
people didn't use it to edit their texts but wrote one heading and
attached a word file instead thus making the search option useless.
The business stakeholders didn't see an increase in productivitiy and
now think of other products.

Again, lack of training time and budget. This is what it boils down to.

-- 
Chris Heilmann 
Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com
Writing: http://icant.co.uk/  
Binaries: http://www.onlinetools.org/


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