- From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
- Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2006 23:27:09 +0000
On Mon, 2006-12-04 at 15:07 +0900, Karl Dubost wrote: > Give the possibility that the "textarea" of a form to trigger an > editor, (A kind of setenv $EDITOR "editorname")(potentially wysiwyg). > and/or implement a real wysiwyg editor for forms in browsers (which > sounds a bit silly when you really think about it) > There will be less nightmare of hand code editing. Nothing based on WYSIWIG principles will /ever/ produce good semantic markup. Semantic markup is about what we think not what we see; and what we think is difficult to deduce unambiguously from what we see. Also, the sheer variation of browsers and their configuration ensures that others will rarely see the same thing anyway. With that caveat, especially given the fact that most browsers compete to make textarea as unusable as possible, allowing users to open an external editor for text inputs and textarea is an extremely sane idea. It's suggested by UUAG: http://www.w3.org/TR/UAAG10-TECHS/topics.html#form-control-orientation Naturally, only text browsers actually do anything so sensible. Fortunately, you can add this basic capability to many other browsers using some applications and plugins which I'll list at the end. Web Forms 2.0 tries to help by including a type attribute. This is better than nothing, but it's not great for two reasons. First, because usually user-contributed content comes in the form of parts of documents (e.g. a string of HTML) not whole documents. Second, because text/html is not nearly specific enough to cover even the different branches of (X)HTML, let alone the microformats and so forth. CURRENT EXTERNAL EDITORS: First I should mention the slightly different approach of the Zope External Editor, which will use the correct editor for the object in question (e.g. an image editor for image objects): http://plope.com/software/ExternalEditor I've found ways to open textarea in an external application for every platform and every browser except Konqueror (anywhere), and Opera and Amaya (on *nix). If anyone knows how to do the same with those, perhaps you could add to this list. MICROSOFT WINDOWS ----------------- Ben Collerson's external.exe can launch the editor of your choice from any Windows text area, including Internet Explorer and Firefox: http://bur.st/~benc/?p=external Read that together with this old Vim tip if you want to use it: http://vim.sourceforge.net/tips/tip.php?tip_id=805 TEXT EDITORS ------------ Not being (seemingly) designed to make the simplest things impossible, Lynx, ELinks, and W3M all include the built-in capability to launch external editors of your choice for any text input or textarea. FIREFOX ------- The following Firefox extensions can launch the external editor of your choice for textarea: Mozex : http://mozex.mozdev.org/ (Windows and *nix only) ViewSourceWith : https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/394/ Editus Externus : https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1195/ There is also an extension that always launches the same WYSWIG editor: Xihna Here! : https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1449/ OMNIWEB and SAFARI ------------------ Apparently, you can open a textarea in OmniWeb with TextMate using the "Edit in Textmate" Cocoa input manager: http://macromates.com/textmate/manual/using_textmate_from_terminal#cocoa_text_fields http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=1876 This implies you could equally use: Vi Input Manager : http://www.corsofamily.net/jcorso/vi/ Annard Brouwer?s XML [and HTML] Input Manager : http://homepage.mac.com/annard/FileSharing9.html Safari also uses Cocoa, so this will work there too; it may also work in Camino, though not as seamlessly: http://lists.macromates.com/pipermail/textmate/2006-May/010223.html I can find no equivalent plugins for Emacs, BBEdit, or JEdit, but alternatively one can heavily personalize the Cocoa Text System to suit one's exact needs: http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Received on Monday, 4 December 2006 15:27:09 UTC