WYSIWYG-Editors: They just don’t get it!
When will you guys finally learn to write good documents?! Yesterday the popular JavaScript framework Ext 1.1 was released, including finally a WYSIWYG web-editor:
If you don’t see what’s wrong about that editor, let me help you: Nowadays, when you write a document or an article, you got different headlines, different paragraph types that when properly used, automatically let’s you create a table of contents, like seen on Wikipedia articles or in OpenOffice.org OpenWriter (or Microsoft Word). You have also style sheets that automatically do the work of assigning different homogenous styles to your headlines throughout the document.
Recently i searched for an alternative blogging client, but i could not use any of them because most did not even have a „format“-field. All my beloved stylesheets assigned to lists and headings here would have be gone! But that’s exactly why they exist! Are you crazy not using them in your editors?
As it goes for having toolbar buttons, these are are absolutly sufficient: “Format” “Remove Format” | „Bold“ „Italic“ | “Unnumbered List” “Ordered List” “Intend” “De-Intent” | “Add Link“ “Remove Link“ | “Text-Foreground” “Text-Background” | “Insert Table” „Insert Image“ should be enough for most users!
August 3rd, 2007 at 20:05
I agree that the Ext team really should be more markup-focused in its editor. Typeface/Size = old and busted, semantic markup = new hotness.
But why berate the poor guys on their blog on the day of a significant release? Ext is extensible, so I can only assume it would be reasonably easy to create a new editor that removes the typeface and size buttons and replaces them with a drop-down of Header 1, Header 2, Normal, etc.
Actually, the only other things keeping me from using this in my own work are (1) I don’t want to replace my entire form-generation framework, and (2) the lack of XHTML scrubbing like TinyMCE has.
September 13th, 2007 at 15:18
I agree with you on lack of predefined styles, but you should keep in mind that the Ext team has done real good work with their framework and you can throw in any editor of your choice. There’s even the possibility to build your own Ext with just the functionality you need so the footprint will be much smaller than with other frameworks.
Oktober 10th, 2007 at 00:38
I don’t blame the Ext.js-Team indeed i respect Jack Slocum and the guys beyond it very much. I just don’t understand why every major framework or WYSIWYG editor does it the ?wrong? way. Is it the customer to cope with? Why let customers decide on bad markup?
Anyway, meanwhile the WYSIWYG editor was extended and they sell it for cash: http://www.wysiwygpro.com/
Meanwhile I prefer using FCKeditor and a nice cleanup script like HTMLPurfier