Why WYSIWYG HTML editors should not exist.


  • Considered Harmful

    At our company, we provide clients with fully content managed websites, and standard in each one is a (third party) WYSIWYG editor for each page, that lets them put whatever XHTML in they want.  Invariably, clients come back to us with terrible monstrosities of XHTML markup they've managed to concoct with the editor.  This is what I saw today, which made me laugh:

    This, however, is not nearly as bad as the ones I've seen; but those aren't funny, just scary.

    The last one I worked on used a separate font tag (or sometimes more than one!) for every character in the text.

    Edit: Block level elements (divs) can't be nested inside of inline elements (spans).  The editor claims to be fully XHTML compliant, but clearly isn't.



  • Only decent one I've seen is Hot Metal Pro. I can't remember how bad it messes up the HTML, but when I was learning I found it really useful.



  •     * Egg and bacon
        * Egg, sausage and bacon
        * Egg and <span>
        * Egg, bacon and <span>
        * Egg, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, egg, <span>, <span>, bacon and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, egg, and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, baked beans, <span>, <span>, <span> and <span>
        * Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and <span>
        * <span>, sausage, <span>, <span>, <span>, bacon, <span>, tomato and <span>


  • Considered Harmful

    @operagost said:

        * Egg and bacon
        * Egg, sausage and bacon
        * Egg and <span>
        * Egg, bacon and <span>
        * Egg, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, egg, <span>, <span>, bacon and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, egg, and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, baked beans, <span>, <span>, <span> and <span>
        * Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and <span>
        * <span>, sausage, <span>, <span>, <span>, bacon, <span>, tomato and <span>

    Nominated for reply of the year. 



  • i guess the spelling of "div" is something different at certain indentations...



  • @operagost said:

        * Egg and bacon
        * Egg, sausage and bacon
        * Egg and <span>
        * Egg, bacon and <span>
        * Egg, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, egg, <span>, <span>, bacon and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, egg, and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, baked beans, <span>, <span>, <span> and <span>
        * Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and <span>
        * <span>, sausage, <span>, <span>, <span>, bacon, <span>, tomato and <span>

     

    Lovely <span/>, wonderful <span/>



  • @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    @operagost said:

        * Egg and bacon
        * Egg, sausage and bacon
        * Egg and <span>
        * Egg, bacon and <span>
        * Egg, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, egg, <span>, <span>, bacon and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, egg, and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, baked beans, <span>, <span>, <span> and <span>
        * Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and <span>
        * <span>, sausage, <span>, <span>, <span>, bacon, <span>, tomato and <span>

    Nominated for reply of the year. 

     

    seconded



  • I am responsible for some Microsoft InfoPath-based applications (no questions please). For those few unfamiliar with InfoPath, it is basically a misguided/disguised Internet Explorer front-end for... well, forms.

    InfoPath's forms editor is an HTML WYSIWYG tool which sometimes resembles ol'FrontPage. You obviously have the choice to edit the source files manually, but it is very, very cumbersome. So you're stuck with the editor and the code it defecates generates.

    Cutting the crap: once I had to clear ~100KB of nested, indented <font></font> tags in a form. I have no idea of why the editor did that. And of course that was totally unnecessary markup...


  • Considered Harmful

    @segmentation fault said:

    i guess the spelling of "div" is something different at certain indentations...

    The underlines indicate validation errors, in this case, placing divs inside of spans.



  • Although this is completely off topic, what editor are you using? I am about to begin a very large project and will need all the help an IDE can give me.

    On a side note, Dreamweaver (no need to mention it, I know) had a cleansing feature that did some basic heuristics to remove Word-generated content. I would guess they have improved this to a more general feature (it's been 3 versions since I last used Dreamweaver).



  • I think the worst Wysiwyg editor I've ever had the misfortune to have to clean up the output of was Adobe Pagemill. The people responsible (unfortunately not responsible enough to get fired for producing such crap) for the site wouldn't know a tag if they were still 5yo and running around outside with friends.

    Thankfully Pagemill's long dead (I hope...), since replaced by other crap editors, but it had some truly fugly quirks to nominate it as the worst HTMl generator ever.

    1. All tags and attributes were forced to uppercase
    2. All output was force-wrapped to 80 columns, unless some bit of content couldn't be split for whatever reason
    3. If you were lucky, some of the tags would be indented, so you could at least see some structure, but generally all indenting was killed on sight by Pagemill.
    4. Every regular HTML tag was given certain Pagemill-specific attributes for some ungodly reason.

    For example, something as simple as

    <a href="index.html'>Click here</a> to return Home

    became

    <A href="index.html" NATURALSIZEFLAG="0"
    OTHERMORONICCRAPTHATADOBELIKEDTOSHOVEINTHEREFLAG=" 1">Click here</A> to return
    Home

    After spending a few days cleaning up the 50 or so pages that comprised the site, removing the Adobe crap, proper casing the tags, etc... One of the idiot "designers" decided to go in and make a minor change to the page, but did it using Pagemill's publish feature. Boom goes all my work as it roundtrips everything through its parser and re-applies all its casing and useless attributes.

    Sigh... good thing for backups. Too bad murder's illegal... a certain someone would've ended up with a Mac in their guts, inserted via a small exit-only (usually) orifice otherwise. 



  • @Kiasyn said:

    @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    @operagost said:

        * Egg and bacon
        * Egg, sausage and bacon
        * Egg and <span>
        * Egg, bacon and <span>
        * Egg, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, egg, <span>, <span>, bacon and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, egg, and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, baked beans, <span>, <span>, <span> and <span>
        * Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and <span>
        * <span>, sausage, <span>, <span>, <span>, bacon, <span>, tomato and <span>

    Nominated for reply of the year. 

     

    seconded

    Thirdeded.


  • Considered Harmful

    @archivator said:

    Although this is completely off topic, what editor are you using? I am about to begin a very large project and will need all the help an IDE can give me.

    On a side note, Dreamweaver (no need to mention it, I know) had a cleansing feature that did some basic heuristics to remove Word-generated content. I would guess they have improved this to a more general feature (it's been 3 versions since I last used Dreamweaver).

    The editor that generated this mess was FCK Editor (internally known as the "Fuck Editor").  The one in the screenshot where I'm starting to clean it up is Visual Studio 2005.



  • @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    The editor that generated this mess was FCK Editor (internally known as the "Fuck Editor").  The one in the screenshot where I'm starting to clean it up is Visual Studio 2005.

    I call it Fuck Editor too. But in this case they can blame the browsers' native editors. IE's CONTENTEDITABLE="true" is particularly nasty...



  • Exactly where I was headed when I was about to post a reply.  Nice job.



  • @Carnildo said:

    @Kiasyn said:
    @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    @operagost said:

    * Egg and bacon
        * Egg, sausage and bacon
        * Egg and <span>
        * Egg, bacon and <span>
        * Egg, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, egg, <span>, <span>, bacon and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, egg, and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, baked beans, <span>, <span>, <span> and <span>
        * Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and <span>
        * <span>, sausage, <span>, <span>, <span>, bacon, <span>, tomato and <span>

    Nominated for reply of the year. 

     

    seconded

    Thirdeded.


    Okay, can I please get a show of hands?



  • @Kain0_0 said:

    @Carnildo said:
    @Kiasyn said:
    @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    @operagost said:

    * Egg and bacon
        * Egg, sausage and bacon
        * Egg and <span>
        * Egg, bacon and <span>
        * Egg, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, egg, <span>, <span>, bacon and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, egg, and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, baked beans, <span>, <span>, <span> and <span>
        * Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and <span>
        * <span>, sausage, <span>, <span>, <span>, bacon, <span>, tomato and <span>

    Nominated for reply of the year. 

     

    seconded

    Thirdeded.


    Okay, can I please get a show of hands?

    Yes. Yes you can.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5h4PFBuzvw

     



  • Woah... :o

    Reminds me of a site I was working on... I was wondering why the text was appearing near the middle of the page. Checked the source code, and it had some stupid number of <blockquote> tags :P

    I think the worst Wysiwyg editor I've ever had the misfortune to have to clean up the output of was Adobe Pagemill.

    Ah yeah, I've heard about that (indeed, it has a very bad reputation).

    @H|B said:

    @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    The editor that generated this mess was FCK Editor (internally known as the "Fuck Editor").  The one in the screenshot where I'm starting to clean it up is Visual Studio 2005.

    I call it Fuck Editor too. But in this case they can blame the browsers' native editors. IE's CONTENTEDITABLE="true" is particularly nasty...

    TinyMCE seems to do it better...

    But then again, it has some WTFs of its own (it's the editor used right here, on this forum).



  • @Kain0_0 said:

    @Carnildo said:
    @Kiasyn said:
    @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    @operagost said:

    * Egg and bacon
    * Egg, sausage and bacon
    * Egg and <span>
    * Egg, bacon and <span>
    * Egg, bacon, sausage and <span>
    * <span>, bacon, sausage and <span>
    * <span>, egg, <span>, <span>, bacon and <span>
    * <span>, <span>, <span>, egg, and <span>
    * <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, baked beans, <span>, <span>, <span> and <span>
    * Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and <span>
    * <span>, sausage, <span>, <span>, <span>, bacon, <span>, tomato and <span>

    Nominated for reply of the year.

     

    seconded

    Thirdeded.


    Okay, can I please get a show of hands?

    Hand, hand, hand, hand, hand... 



  • @R.Flowers said:

    @Kain0_0 said:
    @Carnildo said:
    @Kiasyn said:
    @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    @operagost said:

    * Egg and bacon
    * Egg, sausage and bacon
    * Egg and <span>
    * Egg, bacon and <span>
    * Egg, bacon, sausage and <span>
    * <span>, bacon, sausage and <span>
    * <span>, egg, <span>, <span>, bacon and <span>
    * <span>, <span>, <span>, egg, and <span>
    * <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, baked beans, <span>, <span>, <span> and <span>
    * Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and <span>
    * <span>, sausage, <span>, <span>, <span>, bacon, <span>, tomato and <span>

    Nominated for reply of the year.

     

    seconded

    Thirdeded.


    Okay, can I please get a show of hands?

    Hand, hand, hand, hand, hand... 

    hand.
     



  • I remember working for an ISP and getting a call about someone's personal web site not working. We never usually supported personal web sites as they were provided at no charge, but eventually it was agreed that we would take a look at it for a small price. Well... the web site was produced by Publisher (97 version I'm guessing) and the code was god aweful. I still have nightmares of looking at that cryptic crap. It was no wonder the browsers couldn't render it.

    I ended up running it through a copy of Dreamweaver which did a damn good job of cleaning up the code and restoring the site to a workable state. Dreamweaver did a great job of cleaning up html generated by crap WYSIWYG editors. Back when I used it, it used to be a great editor creating sane code with it's WYSIWYG editor and allowing you to edit it by hand if necessary. Not sure what it's like these days!



  • @DaEagle said:

    I remember working for an ISP and getting a call about someone's personal web site not working. We never usually supported personal web sites as they were provided at no charge, but eventually it was agreed that we would take a look at it for a small price. Well... the web site was produced by Publisher (97 version I'm guessing) and the code was god aweful. I still have nightmares of looking at that cryptic crap. It was no wonder the browsers couldn't render it.

    I ended up running it through a copy of Dreamweaver which did a damn good job of cleaning up the code and restoring the site to a workable state. Dreamweaver did a great job of cleaning up html generated by crap WYSIWYG editors. Back when I used it, it used to be a great editor creating sane code with it's WYSIWYG editor and allowing you to edit it by hand if necessary. Not sure what it's like these days!

     Eugh... Microsoft applications should be banned from even the utterance of exporting to html - MS Word is nearly just as bad - it implants 50-200 useless styles used NOWHERE in the document, Then you get empty font/span tags that sit around doing nothing but expanding the filesize, not only that, it adds inline styles that are used over and over in the document on nearly every paragraph that are nearly a line long in themselves.



    My own WTF in this category: I once took a 1 MB (Yes, Megabyte) HTML page exported from MSWord (I had no choice since the file was originally written using MSWord), and de-fluffed it down to 100 KB (was a long table), took a good hour to get it reasonable since I didn't have any fancy tools around.
     



  • @operagost said:

        * Egg and bacon
        * Egg, sausage and bacon
        * Egg and <span>
        * Egg, bacon and <span>
        * Egg, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, egg, <span>, <span>, bacon and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, egg, and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, baked beans, <span>, <span>, <span> and <span>
        * Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and <span>
        * <span>, sausage, <span>, <span>, <span>, bacon, <span>, tomato and <span>

    I do not get it. Could somebody explain it to me, please ?



  • This should clue you in.

    [url]http://youtube.com/watch?v=wZ7YedEopp4[/url] 



  • @R.Flowers said:

    @Kain0_0 said:
    @Carnildo said:
    @Kiasyn said:
    @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    @operagost said:

    * Egg and bacon
    * Egg, sausage and bacon
    * Egg and <span>
    * Egg, bacon and <span>
    * Egg, bacon, sausage and <span>
    * <span>, bacon, sausage and <span>
    * <span>, egg, <span>, <span>, bacon and <span>
    * <span>, <span>, <span>, egg, and <span>
    * <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, baked beans, <span>, <span>, <span> and <span>
    * Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and <span>
    * <span>, sausage, <span>, <span>, <span>, bacon, <span>, tomato and <span>

    Nominated for reply of the year.

     

    seconded

    Thirdeded.


    Okay, can I please get a show of hands?

    Hand, hand, hand, hand, hand... 

    Lovely haaaannd, wonderful haaaannd...



  • I DON'T LIKE <SPAN>!!

    Well, <span>, eggs, sausage and <span> 'asn't got that much <span> in it.

     



  • @Kain0_0 said:

    @Carnildo said:
    @Kiasyn said:
    @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    @operagost said:

    * Egg and bacon
    * Egg, sausage and bacon
    * Egg and <span>
    * Egg, bacon and <span>
    * Egg, bacon, sausage and <span>
    * <span>, bacon, sausage and <span>
    * <span>, egg, <span>, <span>, bacon and <span>
    * <span>, <span>, <span>, egg, and <span>
    * <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, baked beans, <span>, <span>, <span> and <span>
    * Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and <span>
    * <span>, sausage, <span>, <span>, <span>, bacon, <span>, tomato and <span>

    hand 

    Nominated for reply of the year.

     

    seconded

    Thirdeded.


    Okay, can I please get a show of hands?



  • @operagost said:

        * Egg and bacon
        * Egg, sausage and bacon
        * Egg and <span>
        * Egg, bacon and <span>
        * Egg, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, egg, <span>, <span>, bacon and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, egg, and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, baked beans, <span>, <span>, <span> and <span>
        * Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and <span>
        * <span>, sausage, <span>, <span>, <span>, bacon, <span>, tomato and <span>

     

    quite witty and humourous.

     

    if you're 12.

     

     



  • MS Word is nearly just as bad - it implants 50-200 useless styles used NOWHERE in the document, Then you get empty font/span tags that sit around doing nothing but expanding the filesize, not only that, it adds inline styles that are used over and over in the document on nearly every paragraph that are nearly a line long in themselves.

    That's the real WTF -- that nobody can seem to create an HTML generator that doesn't produce a ton of useless garbage.  Are there really *NO* programmer's who understand what good HTML is?

     


     



  • @belgariontheking said:

    @Kain0_0 said:
    @Carnildo said:
    @Kiasyn said:
    @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    @operagost said:

    * Egg and bacon
    * Egg, sausage and bacon
    * Egg and <span>
    * Egg, bacon and <span>
    * Egg, bacon, sausage and <span>
    * <span>, bacon, sausage and <span>
    * <span>, egg, <span>, <span>, bacon and <span>
    * <span>, <span>, <span>, egg, and <span>
    * <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, baked beans, <span>, <span>, <span> and <span>
    * Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and <span>
    * <span>, sausage, <span>, <span>, <span>, bacon, <span>, tomato and <span>

    hand 

    Nominated for reply of the year.

     

    seconded

    Thirdeded.


    Okay, can I please get a show of hands?

     

    And now something completely different ....

     

    #1

     

    The Larch 



  • @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    The underlines indicate validation errors, in this case, placing divs inside of spans.

     

    oh.  thats kind of funny.  i wonder if other users have thought the same, since people are generally used to the red underlines being spelling errors. 



  • @El_Heffe said:

    MS Word is nearly just as bad - it implants 50-200 useless styles used NOWHERE in the document, Then you get empty font/span tags that sit around doing nothing but expanding the filesize, not only that, it adds inline styles that are used over and over in the document on nearly every paragraph that are nearly a line long in themselves.
    That's the real WTF -- that nobody can seem to create an HTML generator that doesn't produce a ton of useless garbage.  Are there really NO programmer's who understand what good HTML is?
    If I had to guess, I'd say that there is no intersection between the set of "programmers who understand what good HTML is" and the set of "programmers who would create WYSIWYG HTML editors".



  • @H|B said:

    @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    The
    editor that generated this mess was FCK Editor (internally known as the
    "Fuck Editor").  The one in the screenshot where I'm starting to
    clean it up is Visual Studio 2005.

    I call it Fuck Editor too.

    I just call it Fuck Ed.  I think it must have been written by one, anyway.

     


  • Considered Harmful

    @Welbog said:

    @El_Heffe said:
    MS Word is nearly just as bad - it implants 50-200 useless styles used NOWHERE in the document, Then you get empty font/span tags that sit around doing nothing but expanding the filesize, not only that, it adds inline styles that are used over and over in the document on nearly every paragraph that are nearly a line long in themselves.
    That's the real WTF -- that nobody can seem to create an HTML generator that doesn't produce a ton of useless garbage.  Are there really *NO* programmer's who understand what good HTML is?
    If I had to guess, I'd say that there is no intersection between the set of "programmers who understand what good HTML is" and the set of "programmers who would create WYSIWYG HTML editors".

    The problem is more fundamental than that.  WYSIWYG editors are visually oriented, but proper HTML conveys semantic meaning.  When I write HTML I try to ignore the design almost entirely and focus only on the meaning and structure of the content.  Then I use CSS to make that markup match the design.  With enough CSS experience you can make almost any markup fit a design.

    The What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get paradigm is misaligned with proper semantic markup.  Good HTML design separates the design from the content, but WYSIWYG editors nearly by-definition attempt to integrate style with HTML.

    Part of the problem is that HTML has evolved well past the tag soup of the 90s, where XHTML 1.1 has thrown out most styling attributes; but the way people think about it hasn't changed.  This is extremely hard to explain to non-technical paying clients, however.  They don't want to know or care if something is an intrinsically bad idea, they just want it to work.


  • Considered Harmful

    That said, my idea of a perfect WYSIWYG HTML editor is one that only allows <p> tags, <a> tags, <ul> <ol> <li> tags, and <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> tags, and maybe <img><strong><em><blockquote><cite><abbr><address> etc.  It should under no circumstances produce <font> <div> or <span> or inline style attributes.  Ever.  Ever ever ever.  It should just use the CSS we already provide with every site we build.

    It seems like that would be EASIER than building a big convoluted mess of an editor with more bells and whistles than we've ever needed.


  • Considered Harmful

    So my previous remarks aren't taken out of context, the editors just go in specific well-defined regions of the site where we've determined the user can enter custom content.  The structure of the document is already defined and they just "fill in the blank."

    The editors are there so they can add headings, images, lists, hyperlinks, and emphasis.  They should be consistent with the rest of the design and (usually) not change the font face, font color, font size, background, or anything wacky like that.  It cheapens the design when they do that, but the editor allows it.  We would prefer a more locked down and restricted editor, but haven't found any such thing.

    The editors are embedded in the site itself, so it has to be a JavaScript solution of some kind; and as I understand it, it's really the browsers implementation that makes such terrible markup. 



  • @Nelle said:

    @belgariontheking said:
    @Kain0_0 said:
    @Carnildo said:
    @Kiasyn said:
    @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    @operagost said:

    * Egg and bacon
    * Egg, sausage and bacon
    * Egg and <span>
    * Egg, bacon and <span>
    * Egg, bacon, sausage and <span>
    * <span>, bacon, sausage and <span>
    * <span>, egg, <span>, <span>, bacon and <span>
    * <span>, <span>, <span>, egg, and <span>
    * <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, baked beans, <span>, <span>, <span> and <span>
    * Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and <span>
    * <span>, sausage, <span>, <span>, <span>, bacon, <span>, tomato and <span>

    hand 

    Nominated for reply of the year.

     

    seconded

    Thirdeded.


    Okay, can I please get a show of hands?

     

    And now something completely different ....

     

    #1

     

    The Larch 

    Lemon curry? 



  • Change all the "n"s in span to an "m" and you get a nifty Monty Python skid :)



  • I remember Nvu having one of the most terrible b0rkages. The editor claimed to edit XHTML. <WHAT /> <DO /> YOU /> <THINK /> <IT /> <DID /> <TO /> <ALL /> <MY /> <TAGS />



  • @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    That said, my idea of a perfect WYSIWYG HTML editor is one that only allows <p> tags, <a> tags, <ul> <ol> <li> tags, and <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> tags, and maybe <img><strong><em><blockquote><cite><abbr><address> etc.  It should under no circumstances produce <font> <div> or <span> or inline style attributes.  Ever.  Ever ever ever.  It should just use the CSS we already provide with every site we build.

    It seems like that would be EASIER than building a big convoluted mess of an editor with more bells and whistles than we've ever needed.

    I dare you to try a semi-complicated page with no <div> or <span>.  At the very least, you'll have to use some tags in very inappropriate places.



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    @Kain0_0 said:
    @Carnildo said:
    @Kiasyn said:
    @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    @operagost said:

    * Egg and bacon
        * Egg, sausage and bacon
        * Egg and <span>
        * Egg, bacon and <span>
        * Egg, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, bacon, sausage and <span>
        * <span>, egg, <span>, <span>, bacon and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, egg, and <span>
        * <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, baked beans, <span>, <span>, <span> and <span>
        * Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and <span>
        * <span>, sausage, <span>, <span>, <span>, bacon, <span>, tomato and <span>

    Nominated for reply of the year. 

     

    seconded

    Thirdeded.


    Okay, can I please get a show of hands?

    Yes. Yes you can.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5h4PFBuzvw

     

    did you actually mean http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ7YedEopp4



  • @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    That said, my idea of a perfect WYSIWYG HTML editor is one that only allows <p> tags, <a> tags, <ul> <ol> <li> tags, and <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> tags, and maybe <img><strong><em><blockquote><cite><abbr><address> etc.  It should under no circumstances produce <font> <div> or <span> or inline style attributes.  Ever.  Ever ever ever.  It should just use the CSS we already provide with every site we build.

    It seems like that would be EASIER than building a big convoluted mess of an editor with more bells and whistles than we've ever needed.

     

    TinyMCE ?? 


  • Considered Harmful

    @Cap'n Steve said:

    @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    That said, my idea of a perfect WYSIWYG HTML editor is one that only allows <p> tags, <a> tags, <ul> <ol> <li> tags, and <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> tags, and maybe <img><strong><em><blockquote><cite><abbr><address> etc.  It should under no circumstances produce <font> <div> or <span> or inline style attributes.  Ever.  Ever ever ever.  It should just use the CSS we already provide with every site we build.

    It seems like that would be EASIER than building a big convoluted mess of an editor with more bells and whistles than we've ever needed.

    I dare you to try a semi-complicated page with no <div> or <span>.  At the very least, you'll have to use some tags in very inappropriate places.

    @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    So my previous remarks aren't taken out of context, the editors just go in specific well-defined regions of the site where we've determined the user can enter custom content.  The structure of the document is already defined and they just "fill in the blank."



  • @DaEagle said:

    I ended up running it through a copy of Dreamweaver which did a damn good job of cleaning up the code and restoring the site to a workable state. Dreamweaver did a great job of cleaning up html generated by crap WYSIWYG editors. Back when I used it, it used to be a great editor creating sane code with it's WYSIWYG editor and allowing you to edit it by hand if necessary. Not sure what it's like these days!

     I currently use Dreamweaver (I'm limited to what software I can install in a corporate environment) but I can't speak up for what it's like for WYSIWYG.  I use it entirely in code mode where I hand code everything.  I think the only reason I like it is that it colour codes stuff and has lovely little directory structures on the side so I can see where things go.

     I'm just as happy writing code in Edit++ (like notepad but with colour coding as well... I like colour coding). 

    -- Seejay



  • @savar said:

    @MasterPlanSoftware said:
    @Kain0_0 said:
    Okay, can I please get a show of hands?

    Yes. Yes you can.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5h4PFBuzvw

    did you actually mean http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ7YedEopp4 ?

    No, he was providing a show of hands. I would have given http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2cYWfq--Nw myself.



  • @Nelle said:

    TinyMCE ?? 

    TinyMCE als uses the brower's native ContentEditable mode or whatever it's called from browser to browser.

    But I don't know how much processing is done to keep the code in check. 


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