Sent by Michael B. Murdock on 6 November 2003 13:01
Agreed,
A basic cross browser editor is easy using the stock api's provided. The problem is that it isn't
very functional when compared with some Active-X and Java based editors. Additionally, to be more
useful it needs to be more tightly integrated with the CMS letting you select styles defined, pick
images from the library, create links to other content pages, etc.
We have also found that out of the box both the IE and Mozilla editors exhibit some behaviors that
are counter intuitive and confusing to users. An example is pressing the enter key, IE will create a
<P> paragraph when this happens, yet the user expects the cursor to simply go to the next line. A
good portion of the code we have developed is to "clean up" these non-intuitive behaviors.
We have succeeded in creating a very rich editor that is almost identical between IE and Mozilla &
Firebird including filters for cleaning the excess HTML generated by Word in our SiteSage Web CMS
product. As Soren stated creating more than just a very basic editor is not a trivial effort and
requires an intimate knowledge of both the IE and Mozilla DOM and the nuances of each of the API's.
Mike Murdock
Starphire Technologies
www.starphire.com
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL-REMOVED] [EMAIL-REMOVED]]On
Behalf Of Soren Vejrum
Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2003 6:15 AM
To: John Luxford; [EMAIL-REMOVED]
Subject: Re: [cms-list] Cutting and Pasting from Word?!
Hi,
Yes, it is quite easy to make a very basic cross-browser editor for
Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla. However, when you go into
details and more advanced functionality it is very tricky and time
consuming to deal with plenty of differences and limitations in both web
browsers. That is probably one reason why you only see few cross-browser
editors and a number of them still in beta even after quite a long time
with "contenteditable" support in Mozilla.
For example, our HardCore Web Content Editor
(http://editor.hardcoreinternet.co.uk/), consists of approximately 1800
lines of common Javascript code and 450 / 700 lines of Microsoft
Internet Explorer / Mozilla specific Javascript code.
So you should probably think twice before you take a quick decision to
make you own cross-browser - unless you only need very basic
functionality - or you want to take it on as a challenge and get to know
your web browsers intimately. :-)
Best regards,
Soren Vejrum
HardCore Internet Ltd.
John Luxford wrote:
> 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.
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please trim your posts.
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