“Understand, in this world, there are only two kinds of dogs. There are stray dogs and tamed dogs. In exchange for freedom, stray dogs wander in the rain and eat the food called "insecurity". Or tamed dogs who are chained by a collar and eat the food called "slavery". Which one are you?”

Visual Editors?

Wednesday, August 9th, 2006   by Favio

Do you want an embedded WYSIWYG editor for your web applications?

NO!!! Just let me input —pure— HTML. Thank you very much.

Unfortunately, yourself is not the only client you are going to have…erm, hopefully. So what are your guidelines for dealing with this matter? Assuming your development process is almost bulletproof, the reason to include a Visual Editor like this one:
TinyMCE in WordPress
should be backed up by a need to solve a crucial problem. And what you want is probably a modified “light” version of an existing solution.

  • Browser compatibility. It was going beautifully, until I used Opera. If it doesn’t work in all major browsers look for another solution, or implement it yourself.
  • If you have a basic editor, turn the rich editor off by default.
  • Clean markup output.
  • Provides the usual feeling of standard rich editors (i.e. MS Word).
  • If you go with it, please do make extensive testing.

Without having much experience, it is hard for me to imagine a reason why somebody would need (in all the extent of the word definition) a rich editor. Avoid at all costs should be the immediate response. If you succeed in doing this, a feeling of happiness, and tranquility will be your reward.

Good luck!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 9th, 2006 at 9:37 am and is filed under Web development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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