Re: WYSIWYM editors

Daniel Glazman schreef:
> Focus on my 78 years old dad, he's a much better average target...

Actually. I think it’s really important that there is a focus on WYSIWYG 
(what the hell is WYSIWYM?) editors inside the web pages themselves. 
People like your father don’t create web pages with NVU, get an account 
with a provider, and use FTP to upload their pages there; they create a 
page on Myspace, or post their content on forums.

Now I don’t know the Myspace interface, I suspect it already offers a 
WYSIWYG interface. But anyway, it is I think very important that sites 
like Myspace, forums, blog comments and wikis (oh do I loathe 
wiki-syntax!) are able to provide good, easy to use, reliable, and 
semantic WYSIWYG text editors.

Text-based input fields which all use different codes to mark up 
anything but basic text are just so annoying. The primary application of 
WYSIWYG editors is inside web pages.

ContentEditable is very nice, especially if you didn’t need 10 pages of 
code to fix up the browser’s horrible output and dynamically create the 
buttons and switch out the textarea with an iframe, and all the related 
CSS issues. But maybe it could be made even easier by adding an 
‘enctype="text/html"’ attribute of some sorts to textarea, which would 
turn it into a browser-provided WYSIWYG editor that submits HTML, 
including controls for headings, et cetera. That way you don’t need a 
big Javascript library with all its complications to be able to use a 
rich text area (at least, not eventually). So, although per Daniel I’m 
sure the time for this is not right, I propose we add this.

(Bonus points for a browser extension that provides an 
enctype="text/x-bbcode" ;p.)


~Grauw

-- 
Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san nan da!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laurens Holst, student, university of Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Website: www.grauw.nl. Backbase employee; www.backbase.com.