Monday, November 20th, 2006
Groups Wiki: Ajax’d WYSIWYG Wiki
Category: RichTextWidget, Showcase
Some of the interesting features are:
- Always editing, users are always editing their wikis, we attach events to the links so that they can open new pages even while contenteditable is enabled.
- Ajax image insert using a micro-version of lightbox. We also do table insertion the same way.
- Autosave – the users data is auto-saved every 30 seconds via ajax callbacks.
- Nice simple design and simple UI.
The application is built using Rails, Prototype, and TinyMCE. Ben didn’t use this great behaviour.js for this application as he says: “I tend to use behaviour only when doing sites that will actually work without JS” (nice and pragmatic).
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2.5 rating from 28 votes
Who gonna pay for this? It sucks.
People still charge for little widgets like this? Very lame.
Pretty lame. It says Safari not fully supported and then provides no functionality. When I spoof the page as Mozilla 1.1, I get partial functionality. The main problem at that point is that my editing window is a tiny vertical sliver about two characters wide. This looks like a CSS problem rather than a problem with contentEditable. I’m always suspicious of a page that works differently when you spoof as a different browser, because it means the developer is validating against user agent strings rather than against DOM objects or CSS elements.
I wonder if the developer is working with the WebKit team, which is actively working on WYSIWYG editing functionality in Safari. If not, I hope they get on the horn and do so.
Should have done more testing before releasing it! It’s pretty fragile.
So he’s decided to spend his time building a direct competitor to Google Docs, with a tiny fraction of the functionality, and then wants to charge for it. It looks like a class project from a compsci assignment.
Either this guy is completely ignorant of business basics, or he’s praying to God that Google buys him up.