The web is not about producing standards compliant web pages. It is about producing content for everyone to read quickly. If you really want to insist on standards compliance then force everyone who submits anything to be moderated by a compliance officer, but let them produce the content quickly and easily. Although I have some problems with bad style, I have more severe problems with overall writing style which was intended for newspaper publishing rather than web publishing. RTE or not does not help this problem at all. The bad style I can fix in a few minutes. The bad writing is much harder and in most cases I have to talk with them to find out what message they really want to deliver in the few seconds that it will be looked at. -----Original Message----- From: development-bounces@drupal.org [mailto:development-bounces@drupal.org] On Behalf Of Sean Robertson Sent: Monday, February 04, 2008 1:41 PM To: development@drupal.org Subject: Re: [development] rich text editor I use WYSIWYG editors on my sites, but as a designer, I absolutely hate having to. The reason why is that one, they don;t work well, often producing crap code, and two, they allow the end user control over appearance in ways that I don't think them well enough trained to deserve. ;-) The first problem most often manifests itself when users past directly from Word into the editor rather than using the Paste From Word feature in TinyMCE or any similar feature in the others. Word produces crap code, but the users don't know that, and no matter how much we try to train them, they still don't use the correct paste function. CTRL+V in the editor window should be caught and automatically mapped to that Paste From Word function. Furthermore, the editor needs to do a better job of cleaning up code before sending it to the server regardless - it should simply not allow me to enter malformed code. The second is one of aesthetics. We've all seen idiots put bold underlined text in word docs that isn't linked or meant to be. Then there are all the people who insist on using at least three fonts in a page. Anyone using any of my sites will note I've disabled the underline and color buttons as well as all the font and size drop downs, allowing only the basic bold, left and right align, link, unlink, image and paste from word buttons, and the format select element (they can make something an H3 if they want to use my style for that, but they can't change the font manually unless they know HTML). Any solution in code would need to address both of those concerns for me. I'm very picky about producing standards compliant code and I don't want my editor making it easier for clients to screw that up than it needs to be. It's telling that when CNET.com did a standards compliance survey of 1000 US political sites two years ago, one of my sites was in the only 31 that passed, and it was the only one of my sites that the clients hadn't updated content on yet. :-/ Walt Daniels wrote:
I don't understand the mindset of developers who object to rich text. Developers should be developing what the end users want. They overwhelming want to not learn html, but use something as simple to use as Word or OpenOffice. I would much rather have an RTE generating html than someone who doesn't know html. The RTE has a much greater probability of generating reasonable html than most users. Yes, I let lots of users who are not professional web developers enter information. If they do something really gross, I go in and fix it. I do not have the time to hold their hands or do what they can do because they know the content.
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-- Sean Robertson Web Developer NGP Software, Inc. seanr@ngpsoftware.com (202) 686-9330 http://www.ngpsoftware.com No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.516 / Virus Database: 269.19.19/1258 - Release Date: 2/4/2008 10:10 AM No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.516 / Virus Database: 269.19.19/1258 - Release Date: 2/4/2008 10:10 AM