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Programming IT Technology

What Do You Use For Complex Inline HTML Editing? 19

Posted by Cliff from the WYSIWYG-HTML-editing dept.
rmpotter asks: "I'd like to provide WYSIWYG HTML editing within a number of HTML forms. I've looked at a number of free and commercial Java applets that purport to do this. Almost all of them were buggy/slow/less-functional. Frankly, the closest thing I've found is an IE-only solution at SiteExperts.com. It loads quickly, seems very stable and editing features can be added or removed as needed. Seems to me you need this functionality to build usable net/intranet apps. Are there any Mozilla examples worth looking at yet? Or a better Java applet that supports version 4 browsers? Anyone out there found a solution?"
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What Do You Use For Complex Inline HTML Editing? More

What Do You Use For Complex Inline HTML Editing?

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  • but ie5 for windows only.....
    the mac version doesn't work either.

    ps it would help if you told us what the goal was. asking us for a recommendation on which hammer is best without telling us any details is useless. especialy if what you really need is a wrench :).
  • See where is says "editor not installed" or something like that at the bottom of the screen? You need to install a program (the one linked to), restart your browser, then try editing again.

    That's the "windows-only" part. :( It does, however, work with NN 4.75 and IE 5.5 on my work machine. It doesn't generate the pretty code that I'd like, though, and isn't flexible enough for my company's needs, but is somewhat cool just the same.
  • Oops, forgot to mention its main drawback: it's Windoze-only.
  • I didn't see anything appeared to be WYSIWIG - I saw text areas filled with HTML code to create pages.

    Hmm... That's not what I saw at all. What browser were you using? On IE 5.5 it was truly WYSIWYG.

  • I was impressed with this until I clicked on the Try It! button at their website.

    I didn't see anything appeared to be WYSIWIG - I saw text areas filled with HTML code to create pages. I wouldn't call that a very good editor.

    Where I work we've created an inhouse web site editing utility which isn't fantastic (certianly not wysiwig) but it allows users to select text and then click on a button to throw HTML tags around it automagically (ie, you select the text then press the BOLD button). It doesn't bold the text in the textarea box (although that may be possible to do with style sheets) but it is WYSIWIG.

    I could never get this to work in Netscape 4 (it would do the bold tags with "insert text here" inbetween the open and the end).

    I would imagine it would be possible to do a better job with Netscape 6 - the big thing that you need to do this is range support.

    Anyway, I never saw any good products out there that did this, hence the reason we just made one in-house. There's plenty of cheesy javascript or java applets but they just don't seem very good.
  • Hmm... That's not what I saw at all. What browser were you using? On IE 5.5 it was truly WYSIWYG.

    AHh, that must of been it then - I was using Mozilla (20010126) - I guess they haven't gotten around to supporting it yet. :(
  • i used a nice html editor for windows called HotDog Express(http://hotdog.com)

    I don't think hotdog.com was ever used by the HotDog html editor. HotDog was made by Sausage Software [sausage.com] who seem to be moving away from making web creation tools, but still have a website for HotDog [sausagetools.com].
  • Yes, a hammer is not a boat. But both are tools to help gets things done more efficiently.
  • Only a tiny fraction of the computing public eat an sleep code all day. In my opinion, WYSIWYG tools can only help Linux penetrate the masses. If we are talking HTML editing, or linuxconf, it's all the same. Forcing the masses to eat code is not going to help the dream of Linux domination. -- and yes, I use Linux Mandrake. How else am I going to learn!
  • Back in the day before I discovered linux, i used a nice html editor for windows called HotDog Express(http://hotdog.com). This had a split window so you could see the page source and the page preview (in real time). It also came with a bunch of pre-loaded syntax and features out the wazoo. I wish sombody would put enough work into porting hotdog to qt or gtk.

  • I had a quick look at Ektron before. When I saw that it only ran on Windows boxes, it has less advantage over the built-in editing features of IE.

    Another product, NetWord looks promising, though I did not find any pricing on their site. You can download earlier versions, but not the latest. Don't know if it runs on non-Windows platforms though: NetWord [secretgate.com]

    I've used non-WYSIWYG Java and JS to help users add mark-up to pages. People who are used to modern editors don't much care for hand-coding HTML though do they ;-)

    Without a good free cross-platform inline editor, IE will continue to dominate a large class of intranet applications I think.

    Rod

  • You might be interested in Dave Raggett's HTML Tidy [w3.org], which is available from the W3C [w3.org] web site. It finds, reports, and fixes common HTML errors and produces valid HTML 3.2 or valid XHTML 1.0. It is available in C and Java versions.

    There is a config-file setting that tells it to clean up Microsoft Word HTML output as well.

  • P>eWebEditPro isessentially a WYSIWYG HTML text area field that generatesxHTML compliant output. Another words, it is well formed HTML.Web developers integrate it into applications where business users need an easy and automated way to add content. An example would be a press release or a FAQ.

    The editor can be passed an XML packet that get force certain fonts to be used, pass an image or hyperlink library, set restrictions on font size, font color. Another words force the contentto maintain a consistent look and feel. Copy and past from word or Excel and spell check. With international language support for 8 other languages.

    To use it in place of a text field for any dynamic web server,requires one include line of code and one function call. With sample code for ASP, JSP,.ColdFusion,Perl, Lasso. 10s of Thousands of business users are usingeWebEditpro today.

    HTML is great for engineers, but Business users that are use to working in word, will want a WYSIWYG solution that essentially have the samefeatures as word.

  • On modern Windows systems, the simple WYSIWYG HTML editor that makes up FrontPage Express and the editor in Outlook Express should be embeddable as an ActiveX control.

    And if your website is built with Lotus Domino (yeah, right), Domino's web interface includes an equally nice richtext-as-HTML editing widget implemented in Java.

    You haven't said what audience you need this for or how complex the HTML needs to be. Tables? Forms? Styles? Is it for public use, paid customer use, or for an intranet? If it's an intranet, obviously you can go to a commercial or single-platform solution. For general public use, probably not.

    Another interesting approach if this is for an serious content-management system is to use DDE (or its equivalent) through a plugin or a signed applet to launch a full-fledged HTML editor or word processor, pipe the content to it, and pipe the content back via the DDE/etc. link upon a "save" or "close" action in the editor.
  • Ektron's [ektron.com] eWebEditPro [ektron.com] is a popular add-on to Content Management systems for WYSIWYG HTML editing. It has a few really nice features, such as the ability to create well-formed XML (including XHTML). Works in IE and NS, and Ektron has done a good job of making it easy for Webmasters and System Integrators to include it in their apps. PDF data sheet is here [ektron.com].

  • ps it would help if you told us what the goal was. asking us for a recommendation on which hammer is best without telling us any details is useless. especialy if what you really need is a wrench

    What about a web-based front-end to an email system, a user-written encyclopedia, etc.? What about a web-based personal home page creation tool (think GeoCities)?


    All your hallucinogen [pineight.com] are belong to us.
  • As soon as we find a good one, please build it into Slash so we can use it for comment posting.

  • FrontPage gives users the impression that they can write and publish Webby stuff... and as long as nobody looks too closely, the HTML is just about passable.

    I look closely at the HTML documents I review and translate. If it comes from ForntPage, I often have to correct the HTML as well!

    When I first started doing Webby stuff, about four years ago, I went on a four-day training course. One of the things the instructor was keen on, was that we try a "WYSIWYG" editor, then look at the generated code, and then directly code the HTML the "right way"...

    Since then, I've tried several "WYSIWYG" editors (Hot Metal, Netscape Page Composer, FrontPage) and I've also had quite a bit of experience writing documents in FrameMaker and converting to HTML with WebWorks Publisher (but also writing in Applix, MS-Word, and others, and exporting the file as HTML)...

    As far as I'm concerned, none of the "WYSIWYG" editors is any good! The "WYSIWYG" part falls down very soon... you have to start doing "Insert tag" and coding the things by hand in any case... and what you see in the editor is very, very rarely anything like what you (or your users) see in a browser.

    As for drafting the text in FrameMaker and converting, well that's an entirely different philosophy. Use Frame to make documents for paper, and generate Webby stuff from the basic Frame files. More or less like compiling object code (HTML) from source code (Frame)... The point is that the destination medium (web or paper) behaves in a certain way, so you convert the format of the message (contents of the Frame file) to suit...

    If your users are likely to need to produce good-quality Webby stuff, that needs to be portable, you should teach them how to code by hand.
    If they only need to publish small documents at infrequent times, supply them with a restricted set of paragraph and character formats for a word processor (StarOffice, ApplixWare, or some other) and use the application's HTML Export feature.

  • I've been much in the same boat as you. I've known HTML but was keen on trying out some of the WYSIWYG editors out there, and I did. What I found was that all of them produced code that was incorrect, some with misplaced tags or other whatnot. Especially the problem of broken JavaScript or include tags whenever editing inside such an editor - what a headache!

    I have come up with my own solution to the problem, however. My father manages the content of what has now become a rather large site (about 2 new articles per week over the last 2 years). It is indexed by a script that I've created in Perl. He uses Netscape Composer (the editor I found with the fewest issues). Out of the mess it creates, while indexing the documents I've got about a page's worth of regular expressions to fix the errors (basically, I added them as I encountered them) in tags and links, and finally copy the documents from their working directory into the "live" area.

    It's pretty custom right now, so it won't be of much use to anyone else, but this script's been a lifesaver over the last while. It was written after I became extremely agitated over fixing all the stupid errors, added to the code I already had which ran through the directory tree to create the index pages used to navigate the site. Takes a couple minutes to run (the server's a P75), but I only run it once a week, and it works great!

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