[thelist] Browser Based WYSIWYG Editors

[Scott Wehrenberg]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 08:33:55 -0500, Joshua Olson <joshua at waetech.com> wrote:
> FCK Editor is a decent in-browser text editor.  It is one of the best
> available that doesn't rely on a plug-in.  The current version has some
> memory leak issues in IE/Win, but otherwise it's great!

Since you brought this up, I'd be intrested in hearing opinions on the
current in-browser WYSIWG editors out there. I've been looking at a
few for use in building a simple CMS for a couple of projects I'm
working on.

The main features I'm interested in, on top of the basic editing
functionality, roughly in order of importance to me, are:

1) Cross-browser: at a bear minimum it must support IE, Firefox.
Opera, Safari, and whatever else would be nice.
2) Free - It has to be free both as in beer and open source.
3) Ability to use an existing stylesheet - TinyMCE does this nicely.
All available styles are put in a nice select box.
4) Clean Markup - It doesn't HAVE to produce valid XHTML but please
don't make me clean up completely littered code.

So looking at those my short list is:

1) TinyMCE - tinymce.moxiecode.com - Nice set up features, I really
like the CSS features they've tied in, easy integration to the site.
The markup is so-so in my opinion but it's not too hard to limit what
gets produced by restricting the buttons in the advanced theme and
just offering CSS formatting to users. The current version seems to be
a little shaky as they've added a bunch of translation support. Mambo
appears to be using TinyMCE by default which is a plus.
2) FCKeditor - http://www.fckeditor.net/ - Look very similar to
TinyMCE in functionality and implementation. The documentation looks
like it could use some expansion. Generated code looks a little
cleaner.
3) HTMLArea - http://www.dynarch.com/projects/htmlarea/ - From what
I've read there appears to be some confusion on where this project is
going. It appears to be maintained for now. It doesn't appear to have
any suport for existing stylesheets.
4) SPAW - http://www.solmetra.com/en/disp.php/en_products/en_spaw/en_spaw_intro
- Looks solid, code output seems to be great, supports existing
stylesheets. My two concerns here are, gecko support is till in beta
(but seems to work great to me) and it doesn't seem nearly as
community driven as other projects.

Those are the main projects I'm looking at. Any other suggestions, or
opinions on those I've listed?