Sent by John Luxford on 6 November 2003 01:01
Hi Peter,
No Javascript editor is going to do a very good job with pasted garbage
from Word, however, through server-side processing we were able to
harness two projects to provide a cleanup mechanism:
- PHP's PEAR project (http://pear.php.net/) has an HTML/XML package
called HTMLSax, which makes it pretty easy to build a custom HTML
"cleaner" utility, as we have done.
- HTML-Tidy (http://tidy.sf.net/) is another very popular tool for
"cleaning" or "tidying" HTML code, including the garbage Word dishes
out. They are also moving to a library-based code structure, so that
it will be easier to plug into different programming languages in the
future, which makes this a solution that isn't limited just to PHP as
the other one is.
I think this is the generally accepted technique of cleaning MS Word
junk, to pass the duties off to a server-side processor. Of course,
neither of these solutions has proven to be a perfect one for us yet,
so ongoing tweaking and/or making due (depending on your skills or
resources) is sometimes necessary unfortunately.
As to your second point about Mac support -- our system uses a custom
built WYSIWYG editor (wrote it myself, actually :)) -- and it runs both
in MSIE 5.5+ and Mozilla 1.3+ on all platforms. It actually runs
better in Mozilla, despite the implementation being a lot newer than
Microsoft's. Gauging from the level of difficulty/lack-thereof in
adding Mozilla support (very little difference), I would say that most
browser-based WYSIWYG editors will be cross-platform compatible in the
near future. I'm actually surprised to hear Ektron behind the game on
that one... then again, they probably have quite a bit more
functionality than average that needs thorough testing. Makes sense.
As for Mac OS 9 support, OS 9 support was dropped in Mozilla just prior
to 1.3 (in the alpha stage of release). However, there are a few
projects that have tried to maintain this compatibility and provide
their own OS 9 Mozilla releases, the best of which I've found has been:
http://www.wamcom.org/
Cheers,
Lux
On Wednesday, November 5, 2003, at 04:45 PM, Peter Bell wrote:
> Hello There,
>
> I currently use Ektron's EWebEdit as the WYSIWYG editor for my CMS.
> It's
> not bad most of the time, but it often does a horrible job when users
> cut and paste from Word. My understanding is that all of the ActiveX
> WYSIWYG editors just hook into the same Microsoft code, so their
> capabilities are similar . . . Has anyone ever come across a WYSIWYG
> editor that genuinely does a good job of preserving formatting from
> Word?
>
> On a separate note, does anyone have a good recommendation for cross
> browser/platform editor for my Mac clients?
>
> Best Wishes,
> Peter Bell
> FreshSTart Software, Inc.
>
>
>
>
> --
> http://cms-list.org/
> please trim your posts.
>
>
--
John Luxford
President and Chief Developer
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Driving Web Content Management
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