simple, cross-browser rich text editor - does it exist?
Posted: Wed Jun 04, 2008 9:11 am
I need a simple, cross-browser, XHTML-compliant, WYSIWYG rich-text editor.
Something lightweight. Nothing like FCKEditor or TinyMCE, that is.
I have seen editors like nicEdit, Whizzywig and MooEditable, all of which are great! But all of them suffer from the same flaw - they're not really cross-browser; that is, the behavior of the ENTER key is unpredictable - sometimes breaks, sometimes paragraphs.
Apparently, this problem is far more complicated than you would think. The ENTER key behavior method in TinyMCE, for example, is 220 lines of code - and that's just the method itself, not all of the DOM-management, range-handling, etc. that it relies on.
It doesn't look like there's any simple solution to this problem. Semantic, consistent XHTML is an absolute requirement for the projects I work on, and therefore we can't use any of these editors.
Quick fixes have been attempted by several of them, including MooEditable and Whizzywig, which I've been trying to fix for months myself. But it seems rather hopeless...
I'm to the point where I consider dropping WYSIWYG-editing altogether. If the only alternative is 150+KB of mostly unused JavaScript, in the form of TinyMCE or FCKEditors (the only two editors I know of that handle the ENTER key correctly), maybe my customers would be better off using a simple markup of some sort.
Needless to say, a lot of them would object strongly to that.
Has anyone ever heard of a scalable editor, or editor of reasonable size, that handles the ENTER key, and correctly produces paragraphs? I must have tried out 30-40 editors at this point, and if it exists, I'm not finding it...
Any help/ideas would be greatly appreciated!
Something lightweight. Nothing like FCKEditor or TinyMCE, that is.
I have seen editors like nicEdit, Whizzywig and MooEditable, all of which are great! But all of them suffer from the same flaw - they're not really cross-browser; that is, the behavior of the ENTER key is unpredictable - sometimes breaks, sometimes paragraphs.
Apparently, this problem is far more complicated than you would think. The ENTER key behavior method in TinyMCE, for example, is 220 lines of code - and that's just the method itself, not all of the DOM-management, range-handling, etc. that it relies on.
It doesn't look like there's any simple solution to this problem. Semantic, consistent XHTML is an absolute requirement for the projects I work on, and therefore we can't use any of these editors.
Quick fixes have been attempted by several of them, including MooEditable and Whizzywig, which I've been trying to fix for months myself. But it seems rather hopeless...
I'm to the point where I consider dropping WYSIWYG-editing altogether. If the only alternative is 150+KB of mostly unused JavaScript, in the form of TinyMCE or FCKEditors (the only two editors I know of that handle the ENTER key correctly), maybe my customers would be better off using a simple markup of some sort.
Needless to say, a lot of them would object strongly to that.
Has anyone ever heard of a scalable editor, or editor of reasonable size, that handles the ENTER key, and correctly produces paragraphs? I must have tried out 30-40 editors at this point, and if it exists, I'm not finding it...
Any help/ideas would be greatly appreciated!