[development] WYSIWYG editors considered harmful for site admins (and in general, but that's a separate thread)

[Victor Kane]

Just for the record, I wish to point out just two or three things:

1. WYSIWYG editors are here to stay (not necessarily in core, of course) and
are an absolute necessity for many customers.
2. Those customers include "no HTML spoken" administrators.
3. I repeat, administrator != programmer && administrator != person very
knowledgeable about Drupal in any way outside of routine admin tasks..
4. class Admin extends Non_Geek_User
5. Those who use WYSIWYG editors should not use full html input, but should
create an adequate button set / html tag set. Also, additional js filters
and/or tidy html filters should be implemented, as noted above.

A concrete example just the other day, a user/administrator needed a WYSIWYG
editor in order to create blocks herself (in this case to make kinds of
customized blogrolls). With TinyMCE, she could upload icons and make links
without knowing HTML.

So even tho they are the devil's own work, they are here and are used by the
countless hordes.

Please do not forget that and put something prohibiting them in
administration pages, should someone need that functionality.

Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar

On 3/13/07, Karoly Negyesi <karoly at negyesi.net> wrote:
>
> > I think this is a very good idea.
>
> No. It would endorse WYSIWYG editors which are a pestilence, enemy of
> mankind, which should be outlawed.
>
> Unlike the decree above, I was dead serious about adding that note to
> WYSIWYG editors, especially fckeditor and tinymce .
>
> They are proven to break other modules and endorse very bad practice, see
> font tag and other style things that users have nothing to do with --
> wymeditor is an exception here (so is quicktags because that's not a wysiwyg
> editor). They break the 'user input is sacrileged' philosophy -- I know, I
> was forced to use tinymce for a little while up until one day I needed to
> reformat some lengthy text where the linebreaks got garbled totally.
>
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