Comments on: The bane and choice of Rich Text Editors

By: domusvita

domusvita — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 09:45:46 +0000

We are using XStandard. Though the it’s implementation can cause some issues with CSS (can’t hide hide behind overlays) and it’s documentation is sparse at best, the output is always XHTML compliant.

By: Leech

Leech — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:53:02 +0000

Is there a RTF Editor that outputs the source in Textile format? That would be really helpful for me.

Thanks.

By: TeacherBR

TeacherBR — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 12:30:16 +0000

Hi Dion and Folks,

You or the others know any web editor which can be used as a source code editor (with syntax highlight and perhaps code complete), preferably with Java language support ???

Cheers.

By: eargang

eargang — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:30:36 +0000

I’m curious why there aren’t any editors that, behind the scenes, translate HTML into something more restricted — like MarkDown. I’d love to have a WYSIWYM MarkDown editor instead of all this HTML stuff that just brings in Office Crud.

By: kae

kae — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:22:12 +0000

@PuryFury – textarea is good one. ;-)

By: karlstanley

karlstanley — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:03:39 +0000

I used TinyMCE in production code a couple of times, but I found it had major performance problems on pages with multiple editors (the last time I used it the deployment environment was a publishing house where everyone runs IE6 and nobody has a PC less than 3 or 4 years old. Lots of reports of non-responding browser from the users), so I switched to the YUI editor.

I felt bad about it as it seemed to me TinyMCE were the innovators here and I wanted to support them, but in the end the maintenance headaches were too much for me.

I find the YUI editor has better performance (anecdotally – I didn’t run benchmarks – this is just based on feedback from users) and has better support for image embedding (it’s pretty easy to build a drag/drop image embedding tool), which really matters when your users aren’t all that tech-savvy but still need to be able to put pictures in their documents.

With both editors, I found my biggest headache was getting correct XHTML markup out of them, in particular given that lots of the content ended up being cut and pasted from MS Word into the editor window. I ended up writing lots of fairly hacky server-side code to sanitize the input. You don’t want to know about how Word marks up tables…

I would recommend YUI over TinyMCE. Neither are perfect but both are better than writing your own rich text editor!

By: PuryFury

PuryFury — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:46:47 +0000

well.. I like simply design,functional editors.
anybody can show me?

By: newz2000

newz2000 — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:17:30 +0000

I deployed WYSIWYGPRO v2 and liked it a lot, but maybe not for shiny features that make it show up on the top of a list. The big selling point is that we found it worked very consistently and reliably across browsers and operating systems which made it very easy to create documentation and train staff. I have not tried v3 much yet but it has a new system for creating plugins that looks very well thought out. I recently deployed tinymce in a project and found that inconsistencies abound (for example, clicking in a blank editor and hitting the enter key causes different results in different browsers).

By: James Skemp

James Skemp — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:00:30 +0000

Well that didn’t take long – account seems to be suspended already …

The problem that I always run into is cross-browser issues, and that that results in code getting re-written.

border:1px solid black; becomes border-top:1px solid black;border-right:1px solid black; …

By: starkraving

starkraving — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:03:49 +0000

TinyMCE is the one I’m using these days, mostly because it’s the only one I’ve seen that can toggle from a simple textarea to the rich controls and back, whenever the user invokes it. Perfect for use with the ‘edit-in-place’ paradigm.

By: eyelidlessness

eyelidlessness — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:58:50 +0000

TinyMCE is buggy and… not tiny. I recommend against it, especially if you anticipate having to edit the source code at all.
.
FCK is generally the most-recommended choice from people with experience with these things, but it’s a little buggy too. For instance, its default configuration allows you to nest styles like bold by using the native browser cmd-b (Safari) then the toolbar bold, essentially making it impossible for FCK to know what native styling you’ve applied. It also does some weird stuff like shifting (visual) whitespace around unexpectedly.
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Faced with what I consider to be a bunch of poor choices, I have rolled my own editor for an AIR app (it feels rock solid, but has the advantage of having to only target Webkit), and haven’t looked back.
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For public-facing solutions, I’d still probably recommend FCK despite its flaws. It’s the best out there.

By: dmayle

dmayle — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:23:44 +0000

Take a look at Xinha ( http://www.xinha.org ) It’s a mature option, that’s been around for awhile and is currently moving forward quickly.

By: vitrus

vitrus — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:45:16 +0000

I’ve worked with nicEdit in the past which is very small (it even has all the icons in 1 jpg). Performance however really becomes a problem when you add more than one editor to a page (especially in IE), and the lack of plugin support is a pity.

PunyMCE looks worth checking out..

By: indiehead

indiehead — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:14:51 +0000

nice one Spocke, must try that one out,

By: indiehead

indiehead — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:14:17 +0000

TinyMCE is one of the good ones, very usable & customisable.

By: Spocke

Spocke — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:10:51 +0000

If you need a really small and lightweight editor then have a look at PunyMCE.
http://www.moxieforge.net/overview.php?project_id=9&category_id=5