WYSIWYG Hell
Robert goes off on a rant about WYSIWYG editors that require Internet Explorer for Windows and generate crappy code. Welcome to WYSIWYG Hell.
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About the author
Roger Johansson is a Swedish web professional specialising in web standards, accessibility, and usability. More about me and this site.
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Comments
Maybe a rant... :-) Or maybe just a strong belief in making it better.
Waaagh... don't remind me on my day off. I make spiffy validating XHTML 1.1 templates, priority 3 accessible even. Then they hang Telerik's Rad editor in MS-CMS, for the customer to paste word-documents in.
I cry myself to sleep at night.
Can anyone recomend an editor which doesn't kill the point of making validating sites?
Robert: That's a belief I share :-).
Woolly: Yes, XStandard is very good. It is currently Windows only (IE and Moz/FF), but a cross-platform version is in the works.
I too have suffered at the hands of MSIE's bizarre editor code (even without the horror that results when an Office document is pasted in). I'm currently working on a component which walks the DOM tree of the editable region, recreating the markup in an XML DOM Document sans the cruft, suitable for uploading to the server via AJAX.
At the moment it uses a fairly naive approach to throwing away the rubbish, but the next iteration will use a more complex algorithm to ensure that only valid XHTML/1.0 makes it through the reparse. You can do some wonderful things with object oriented JavaScript...
Kupu does a good job at returning clean XHTML to the server. Includes support for more than one browser or OS.
PROGRAMMERS dont complain, they find a coding solution. That is exactly what I did. Its good to know both design AND coding because you can then level out these 'sufferings'. :-)
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