Re: wysiwyg editors

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On Friday 25 June 2004 6:27 am, Matt wrote:
> Interesting stuff!

Indeed = )

> > IE : '<strong>bold</strong>'
> > Moz - (default): '<span style="font-weight: bold;">Bold</span>'
>
> <snip>
>
> > For me this kind of throws a wet blanket over the whole rich-text
> > editing thing. Play with the examples in both clients and compare
> > the HTML output.
>
> Ugh. Yup. Well. Cross-browser rich-text editing is a pretty new
> thing - I'm still impressed it works at all.

So I've got a monkey wrench to throw in the works:

	I don't think producing HTML is helpful.

The browser is going to need to render whatever we do as HTML, but 
ISTM that HTML as a destination format is a poor choice for any 
number of reasons. Firstly, it's ambiguious. The discussion we're 
seeing here outlines that pretty strongly. Secondly, as has also been 
noted here, the HTML output from these tools varies from browser to 
browser. We could spend a lot of time normalizing after the user is 
finished editing, but then we're essentially attemping to patch-up 
everyone's bugs, and as much as I do that all over NW, I try to do as 
little of it as possible.

All of which leads me to the conclusion that there needs to be another 
intermediate format. Right now, I think that something like Textile 
would be an almost ideal representation language. The textbox might 
be able to work in either "WYSIWIG" or "textile" mode and allow you 
to switch between them. The essential thing here, though, is to 
manage the translation between HTML and Textile ourselves in 
realtime. I know that sounds icky, nasty, and painful, but I will 
give us output that's somewhat consistent, readable, and 
transformable (easily).

> > Unless you do not use the default markup and instead make your
> > own, which HTMLArea lets you do quite easily.
>
> Perhaps we could make some stock alternate toolbars available
> easily from within the inline constructor? At least that'd save
> recoding the workarounds each time. Or even suggest the
> replacements to the maintainers?
>
> > I've used the editor on my company's Intranet but I've limited it
> > to Headings/bold/italic and lists. Anything else puts too much
> > crap in with the data and it'd mean I'd loose control of the
> > presentation of the content (i.e. definately don't want font tags
> > or even inline font styles in body text).
>
> Yes, that's why I want to see the option to have a CSS-style
> selector in the toolbar - which HTMLArea does. But that stuff has
> got to be up to the implementor.

This is another reason to scrap the concept of straight-to-html IMO. 
The CSS can/should be applicable to the output, but it shouldn't be 
tied to the representation that we send back to wherever things are 
going.

> > I've even started to think the wiki style of markup is a better
> > solution!
>
> Noooo! <struggles to suppress rant on the Evil Cult Of Wiki />

Wikis are something else that could benefit from a Textile-like 
markup. I've been wrestling with how to improve the wiki at work, and 
flat-out replacing the entire language it uses seems to be the first 
reasonable step. Something like this would play into that.

> OK, you're a strong +1 on HTMLArea. Anyone else?

If we can hack it to do what I would like, then I'm a +1 on it too. 
Otherwise, it might make a lot of sense to investigate the work 
involved in just re-doing it.

Regards

- -- 
Alex Russell
[email protected]   BD10 7AFC 87F6 63F9 1691 83FA 9884 3A15 AFC9 61B7
[email protected] F687 1964 1EF6 453E 9BD0 5148 A15D 1D43 AB92 9A46
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