WYSIWYG editing: execCommand & co

On Wed, 14 May 2008 13:20:01 +0200, Frederico Caldeira Knabben  
<fredck@fckeditor.net> wrote:
>> The fact is, FCK Editor (and many other tools, both within Web apps
>> and not) have been producing obsolete and invalid HTML for quite
>> some time; in this case, <font> has been obsolete
>> for 7 or 8 years before your tools finally stopped using it.
>
> The problem we had in the past (and still today) is that browsers came  
> with the promise that everybody would be able to "make your editor at  
> home",
> which is a good thing in JavaScript, where less code is better, due to
> parsing and execution performance, as well as download times impact. Just
> call your preferred execCommand command and the magic is done.

FWIW, I don't think that generating <span style="font-size:small"> is any  
better than generating <font size="2">. If you're doing WYSIWYG editing,  
and that's what people want to do it seems, you will end up with  
presentational markup. You can try to mask this somehow using the style=""  
attribute, but it will not make your markup better, more maintainable or  
more accessible. It's the same thing in a different syntax and arguably  
worse as style="" attributes are harder to filter.

(I'm not saying there's a better solution to this problem by the way, but  
I think that the issue here is one of user interface design, and not what  
kind of markup a particular generates.)


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>

Received on Wednesday, 14 May 2008 14:13:58 UTC