[development] rich text editor

[Walt Daniels]

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 at drupal.org [mailto:development-bounces at drupal.org]
On Behalf Of Sean Robertson
Sent: Monday, February 04, 2008 1:41 PM
To: development at 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.
> 
> 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
> 

-- 
Sean Robertson
Web Developer
NGP Software, Inc.
seanr at 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