[thelist] Web-based wysiwyg html editors ?

[Michael Kimsal]

Androse Rosewood wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm working on a custom content management system in php.
> The users will be editing the content of the site via a web interface
> (simple text-fields).
> The content is made of long articles, so the users want to be able to
> apply some formatting to the long texts. Stuff like : <b>, <i>, or
> some pre-defined css classes for color or font switching. No table
> formatting or layout, just very simple inline formatting. They also
> want to be able to create hyperlinks.
>
> The difficult part is that they want a wysiwyg interface. The do
> *not* want to insert tags (not even simplified ones) in the text.
>
> Solution 1 : Flash ?
> So I have found such a thing in Flash5 here :
> http://www.active-web.cc/html/wysiwyg/
> ...but apparently there are still some bugs with links, plus the
> licensing model isn't very attractive.
>
> Solution 2 : ActiveX ?
> Somebody said once that Microsoft as made an activeX control to do
> just that, but I haven't been able to find any info about it. Then
> again, a cross-plateform solution would be better.
>
> Solution 3 : HTML+JS ?
> I remember seeing once an implementation of an editor made in HTML
> and JS. I think it only worked in IE6/Win. Maybe using some obscure
> DOM techniques ?
>
> So my question is :
> - Have any of you already done this before ?
> - Do you know of any solutions available ?
> - If not, maybe do you know of good place to look for it ? (I've
> spent 2 hours on google already).


http://www.labs4.com/go/index.php is a good place to start.  They've got a
decent standalone editor for $12.

Your solution #3 above was actually #2.  Anything that only works
in IE/Win is going to be activex of some sort.

We are working on a Mozilla-based version of a WYSIWYG editor
for our LogiCreate.com app server, but Mozilla still basically sucks for
this sort of stuff, and it'll be some time before it works even remotely
as well as the IE/Windows component.

Beware - there are many wysiwyg Java applets and whatnot out there,
but most products seem to operate ONLY on complete HTML documents,
not snippets of HTML code, which is probably what you want if
you're doing a CMS of any sort.  The IE component does that pretty well.
Many of the Java ones I've seen will automatically add DOCTYPE
and HEAD and BODY tags, which is definitely not what you'd
want to be dealing with.  Having looked at this problem for some time,
it really seems like MS is about the only company that 'gets it'.  Mozilla
had the opportunity to put a nice cross-platform wysiwyg editing component
together (just strip down some of the COMPOSER code, for example),
but instead they chose to focus on useful things like MathML.  IE
is still the only platform for easy to use, powerful, browser-based
content-management, unless you pay exhorbitant amounts for slow Java
applets
(realobjects.de has one, but even that one, iirc, doesn't work with
snippets,
but only full pages - please correct me if I'm wrong someone!)

Michael Kimsal
http://www.logicreate.com
734-480-9961