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Software The Internet

Better Browsers for Text & Form Handling? 65

Posted by Cliff from the text-editor+browser==emacs-minus-kitchen-sink dept.
Dan Warne asks: "I work as a web content administrator for one of the big newspapers in Australia. The front end of our content manager is browser-form based. Yet browsers all have horrible text editing features; neither Mozilla nor IE support search-and-replace, something desperately needed for anyone who works with a lot of form content. Aside from using a standalone text editor, what software out there provides a better browser-based solution for people who work with text in web forms a lot?"
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Better Browsers for Text & Form Handling? More

Better Browsers for Text & Form Handling?

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  • Pick Up a Book... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by B1LL_GAT3Z ( 253695 )
    Pick up a book on Javascript, and write your own! The 'Search and Replace' feature that you mentioned would take an experienced programmer only minutes to write - and if you're just beginning, you could probably have something working before the day is over. My guess is that you'll probably save a bunch of money, and support costs, over using some proprietary third-party utility.
    • I second that motion. Javascript, like Java is good at dealing with string insertion/replacement. You don't even have to buy a book. Just search Google for guides and/or an example of text replacement.
      In fact, If you pay me, I'll even write it for you. Like other people in IT, I'd stand on my head for money at this point.

      Good luck!

    • Re:Pick Up a Book... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by br0ck ( 237309 )
      He's a content manager, not a developer. He just wants a browser with a more usable text area, which seems like a reasonable request. Perhaps his development team could make things much easier by adding a web-based WYSIWYG editor [google.com]. Many of them are IE only, but the beta of this free one [interactivetools.com] works in Mozilla and looks easy to implement.

  • lynx! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by redelm ( 54142 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @05:36PM (#7048988) Homepage
    Alright, so I'm a reactionary dinosaur!

    Right now, I'm writing this with `vim`, having hit ^Xe in the textbox that `lynx` opened up. I have all the unimaginable power of vim at my disposal. :)

    • Re:lynx! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by You're All Wrong ( 573825 )
      Ditto my w3m happily calling jed. I could configure it to call xemacs instead, of course (and lynx could likewise).

      Wait a second - we're supposed to be the crippled text-mode guys, how come we're the ones who are laughing?

      YAW.
    • lynx good! Also, I recently installed gentoo, which familiarized me with links2. A lot like lynx, but differenter.
    • ...and have a simple way for them to return it.

      We can do that right now by adding the OOo doc as a frame and leaving a form with an "upload" button in another frame, but that's kind of clumsy. With KDE 3.2 and KOffice 1.3 (stably by 1.4, I expect), OOo docs will be embeddable as KParts so it should in theory be simple enough to integrate that, maybe a frame with "save" and "revert" buttons on it and another with the doc itself.

    • I have all the unimaginable power of vim at my disposal

      Yes, UNIX folks know how to handle god like powers. DS wants a pretty GUI!

    • Choose the power of Emacs with builtin web browsing!

  • w3m / vimpart (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cjpez ( 148000 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @05:38PM (#7049006) Homepage Journal
    w3m [sourceforge.net] drops me into vim whenever I do input on a text box. I'm sure other textmode browsers let you do similar things.

    I also have high hopes for someday being able to use vimpart [freehackers.org] as a textarea editor in Konqueror - that alone would get me to switch over from Moz.

    • w3m rocks. (Score:2, Informative)

      by markjugg ( 21992 ) *
      I've recently been using w3m a lot more recently and highly recommend it. It supports a number of vi-like and emacs-like keystrokes if you are into that kind of thing. It also has a number of other noteworthy features:

      - Although it's console based, it can display images. This is a really neat trick. It's actually using X11 to overlay images on the console. It even works when w3m is in a remote terminal, as long as X11 is forwarded back.

      - It supports tabbed browsing.

      - SSL support

      - It supports tables and

    • Re:w3m / vimpart (Score:2, Informative)

      by ajs318 ( 655362 )
      Um, can't Konqueror transport a textarea into Kate, where you can edit it to your heart's content - it even understands ed commands - and then back again? This is exactly the sort of functionality KDE is supposed to have built in. However, I'm unable to confirm this because I'm at "work" right now and having to put up win Win98SE. {Though I am hoping to find a way to break my HDD; then I'll reinstall Win98SE dual-booting with Slackware.}

      Even if there is no inbuilt way of doing this, you can do it all

  • Applets (Score:2, Interesting)

    by HawkingMattress ( 588824 )
    For CCMs using editor applets in place of the standard textarea can be a solution. There are lots of them, and they also support html ~wysiwyg formatting...
  • I am a regular Opera user, and I was all set to say "Hey, with Opera, I can find and replace in form fields!"

    Sadly, I just tried it and I cannot. Is this really such a difficult feature to implement, or has nobody really brought it up before now? Certainly in my years of using a browser I've not needed this feature (otherwise I would have known that Opera doesn't do it) -- but now that I know the feature is lacking, I want it. ;)
    • And having seen the speed of the changes in the latest betas of Opera 7.20 I can guess that feature will be ready in a matter of a couple of weeks or less.
    • it's a simple feature as can be.. few lines javascript could probably even do it no problemo and i'd be surprised if one couldn't find an example how to do just it with google under 15 mins(heck, it sounds just like a plugin request for mozilla to me).

      but the thing is that maybe nobody just thought that you would actually use the browser for editing articles(without having plugins, applets or whatnots ). for posting them, sure. but i'm pretty sure they'd have more dandy time writing the articles in a real
  • searching:

    find / -iname index.html
    grep -e "stuff to find" ./*.html

    replacing:
    sed -e "s/one/two/" index.html >newindex.html

  • Unless there is one already, write your own or hire someone to write it.

  • FCKeditor (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Ruis ( 21357 )
    Here's a nice one that generates html that can be submitted via a form. It can paste from MS Word and is very easy to use. It has built in image uploading capabilities. It's really a full on wysiwyg html editor that is web based. It currently only works under IE, however.
    FCKeditor [fredck.com]
  • I seem to remember reading something sometime about someone who had made a vi-plugin for mozilla? So that any actually spawned a vi-instance, bringing you all the excellent vi-feats.
    Anyone else remember seeing this? Perhaps it was someones wish-feature, as I can't seem to find anything about it on google :p
    • ...So that any TEXTAREA actually spawned a vi-instance...

      Bad slashcode for removing anything in square brackets when in 'Plain Old Text' mode, hrmpf!
      • ( ) Parentheses or round brackets
        < > Brokets or angle brackets (type &lt; &gt;)
        [ ] Brackets or square brackets
        { } Braces or curly brackets
        &laqou; &raquo; Guillemet, angle quotes or chevron brackets (real ones thoughtfully ripped by slash)
        I'm betting that you used brokets, as in <TEXTAREA>, but without escaping them, yes?
    • Electrix [reddleman.org] lets you spawn any editor for text area boxes.

  • OmniWeb (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RalphBNumbers ( 655475 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @06:19PM (#7049439)
    OmniWeb has find&replace, as well as a bunch of other handy text handling features for forum input (inline spell checking, extensible functions with the services menu, etc).

    It's MacOSX only though, of course, if you're working in the print industry getting a mac to run it on shouldn't be too hard.
  • I have to use inhouse applications for order tracking, trouble tickets, one thing that they dont seem to do, remember the text I filled into forms.

    So, I have to enter data again, and again. Text input has always been a problem on browser. I have some applications that auto-fill, but things like "date" should be autofilled.

    A browser with advanced text input features, would really be useful.
    • Aside from using functions that are designed for entering personal information (like MS Wallet) to auto-fill forms, one could reasonably expect that the author of the server-side code would be able to easily implement a change to have it pre-fill the form's date field...

      At least, that's a thought for right now to deal with it.
  • Whatever happened to FILE uploads?

    YAW.

  • vi wrong approach for this? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Experiment 626 ( 698257 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @06:47PM (#7049681)

    Don't get me wrong, I love vim. However... most of the suggestions here have been along the lines of "vi in a browser" type ideas. This is excellent for power users, but might not suitable for the newspaper staff in question to do their content editing

    vi (and emacs) have more wonderful features than almost anyone would ever use, but the learning curve that comes with this can be intimidating for some. Are the people who will be using this system tech types, or journalists? If the latter, they probably won't think that ":%s/Linux/GNU\/Linux/g" is quite as intuitive as a dialog box with boxes labelled "Find" and "Replace with".

    Depending on the proficiency of the intended users, they may well be better off with some kind of plugin / applet / whatever that resembles Wordpad than trying to master an editor with hundreds of not-so-intuitive keystrokes and commands.

    • That depends also on how often you need new users. If the form is used only by a few staff reporters, training them to use vi isn't particulary hard, it just takes some time. If the form will be used by hundreds or thousands of people, many who only use it once, then teaching vi isn't worth it.

      The people who use it over and over again may (or may not) come to love vi once they learn the power features without leaving the keyboard.

      • people who use it over and over again may come to love vi once they learn the power features

        I think its only the ones who believe that the machine should do the work. Some are Luddites, and don't want the machine to do their work. Me I love automating tasks. Automation is better than hiring headcounts, they work nights and weekends, do what you say, and don't call in sick.

        : % ! perl 's/ (\d+) (\d+) / (($1) - ($2)) /e'

        Try that with vim inside a file of the output of "gdf -k".

    • I agree with you, sort of. I'd be glad to have vim in my browser window. However, I think that the solution is to let people customize what they get by being able to select a text editor. Perhaps they only need to create a soft link or short cut to their favourite editor.
  • If you don't like java and your clients are all Windows or Mac users then you may want to consider shockwave. Shockwave scripting language (lingo) is fairly powerful (once you get to know it) with editing text and text assets in the shockwave movie can be used to produce html or rtf data that could be save and/or uploaded to where they need to be.

    Of course, there's no linux support (yet) for shockwave and I'm probably a bit biased since I've been doing shockwave work for 3 years straight.

  • Tried Firebird? (Score:4, Informative)

    by diesel_jackass ( 534880 ) <travis...hardiman@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @07:19PM (#7049980) Homepage Journal
    Check out Mozilla Firebird [texturizer.net] and install the Mozex extension [mozdev.org].

    Then you can easily associate external editors for textareas. If that doesn't suit your needs you could always write your own extension. (It's pretty easy, I wrote my first one, Image Zoomer [mozdev.org], in about 2 days last week.)

  • Having come from a graphic design background, I've developed a pet peve about using a program for something other than for what it was intended when there are programs out there whose strength is that particular function. In design, it manifests itself by people using Quark as a Word Processor. Then there are accountants that use Excel as a Word Processor. In your case, you're trying to use a program designed to surf the web to edit text. What is with the fear of word processors or dedicated text editors? T
    • Sory buddy, since the dawn of the web browser people have been using it as the standard client for client/server apps. Write it for web standards and it will work on any client. Or so the theroy goes.

  • Mozilla extensions (Score:2, Informative)

    by Przepla ( 637674 )
    Mozilla extensions can do almost anything you want
    Consider:
    Electrix [reddleman.org] -- not developed anymore, but still functional. From its site: "To edit the text in a textarea, hit Ctrl-e. The editor you set up will appear. Once you exit the editor, Electrix will write the changes back to the textarea."
    Or htmlArea [interactivetools.com] -- this works within browser and suports IE beside Mozilla; but of course you don't want users to use it, aren't you?
  • I'm amazed that nobody has mentioned this already: many blog systems support an XMLRPC api. This means that nice clients can easily be written for many different platforms. Maybe you should look into something like that.

    Movabletype.org says they support "Blogger and MetaWeblog XML-RPC APIs".

    disclaimer: I'm an XML-RPC fan, but have NO experience with blog servers or clients.

  • External Editors (Score:2, Informative)

    by mvcee ( 687220 )
    Zope has a very neat implementation of an External Editor [zope.org].

    It uses a helper application within your browser to edit text in the editor of your choice.

    Even if you are not using Zope I am sure you could adapt this to other app servers.

    Also WebDav provides complementary facilities and is available from within ie on the client WebAdmin [cpg.com]. This approach will require that your server speaks webdav too.

  • Thanks everyone for the suggestions, especially those people who suggested Mozilla Plugins as a solution. (I had previously searched for these without much luck).

    I agree totally that web browsers are an inappropriate front-end for content management and editing, but you've got to work with what you've got. Unfortunately a lot of content management systems do use a web front end.

    Take HTML as an analogous example. It was never designed for precise page design and layout, but more for structuring content r

    • I realise that most WCMS programs use web forms, but have you considered looking into how difficult it'd be to swap out the front end? Have you contacted the vendor of the software? Perhaps they have some suggestions?

      A lot of WCMS vendors work on collaborative systems, so if there were some way to integrate with Macromedia's system (Contribute) or else some other interface that perhaps modifies the browser either via plug-in or proprietary interface (since you're on Wintel), that might be the best way to g

  • Rich-Text Editing in Mozilla/IE (Score:4, Informative)

    by ManxStef ( 469602 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @08:12PM (#7050458) Homepage
    I'm not sure if this'll quite fit your needs, but, assuming you can edit the form templates in Vignette or whatever CMS you use, surely you could roll your own solution using the default features in Mozilla? See the Rich-Text Editing in Mozilla 1.3 [netscape.com] over at DevEdge, and check out the working demo [mozilla.org] for a good example of what it's capable of and how easy it is to use (or Kevin Roth's sweet cross-browser version [kevinroth.com]).

    You'll need to add some additional code to allow for features such as search & replace, but all that'd take is a few lines of ECMAScript/javascript...

    • If you're happy with (not so nicely formatted) HTML as input , this is certainly a start.

      Some alternative editors:

      - mozile [mozdev.org] - xhtml editing for mozilla.

      - Bitflux Editor [bitfluxeditor.org] - Wysiwyg XML Editing for Mozilla (based on mozile and yes, this is a shameless plug ;) )

      - Xopus [xopus.org] - Wysiwyg XML Editing for MSIE/Win (commercial product...)

  • We use Ektron's eWebEditPro, which has an XML-based customization scheme. You can allow users to post HTML, or simply allow them to do some more advanced things w/ plain text.

  • Konqueror will have it! (Score:3, Informative)

    by unixmaster ( 573907 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @03:47AM (#7052878) Journal
    KDE Developer George Staikos heard your prayers ;) . See http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=10644750911077 0&w=2 [kde.org]. Kudos to KDE team once again ! .
  • There is a product called htmlarea [dynarch.com] which is fully cross browser compatible and doesn't write crap HTML code like all the IE only ones.

    The real funky thing about this one is that there are spell checker and tables modules available for it.

    • ok it doesn't omit " with attributes and seems to create clean code after a few quick tests - but it still uses the font tag, which is deprecated in HTML 4 and not in the XHTML specs.

      Besides that it should already support stylesheets. Like using MS-Word you create a style for a paragraph, headline or whatever and re-use the same style for all repeating instances of these page-elements. The advantages using CSS would be - People know how it works to define styles in Word, they can change the style of the

  • If a text-based browsers is an acceptable option, no browser has a
    better built-in text editor than Emacs/w3. It's fully extensible,
    fully scriptable, and closer to fully featured than any other editor
    available today. The more advanced features do have a learning curve,
    but what fully-featured thing doesn't?
    • Hold on. Last time I've checked Xemacs with w3 mode it showd me some gifs and jpegs. Javascript might be not up to date (well, that time it didn't work at all). But the real problem of (X)Emacs/w3 is that the developers dropped it. Too bad.
  • Take a look at the Safari browser on OS X. It offers MS-Word-style spellcheck (red dotted underlines) for all form fields, if you enable it by right-clicking on any field. I think you may find difficulty locating a browser with search-and-replace within form fields, though. I can't say I have run across one yet.

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