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like "FCKeditor? yeah. agreed. good product, /bad/ name.

It's been done.

It's not the language's fault that programmers suck. If you hate JavaScript because it is hard to read and understand, Perl has a worse reputation in this area. Yet, I've worked with Radius server code in Perl 5 years ago that's well commented and well documented, and it was a pleasure to work with.

If you doubt my experience with JavaScript, I'm currently a core developer at FCKeditor (note my name in my homepage), and in 2005 I've written a large scale AJAX app from scratch that's now still being developed and extended by a team of 20+ developers, and is currently being used by multiple cities to manage their citywide Wi-Fi installation.

But of course, credentials are useless in technical discussions. I told you that only because you asked. My point is, it is entirely possible to write easily readable code in JavaScript, Perl or C - as long as you have good development practices in place (e.g. have good coding conventions, code reviews, good comments, good documentations). FCKeditor's internal code doesn't have good documentations right now but we have the former three items, and after a month the code base was easy to work with. Everything in CKEditor 3 is going to be well documented with JSDoc. I recommend you to go take a look at it.

And... finally, if you *need* to have declared variables because you make too many typoes... Ctrl-P in vim is your friend. ;)

Actually, if you look at the source, this line:

<link href="/wsn/images/js/FCKeditor/editor/css/fck_editorarea.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

It would appear that they are using WSN Links with FCKeditor.

My favorite thing about that site is still the "Patent Panding" (sic) SD card, which was quite obviously (and badly) Photoshopped.

Agreed about OO.org. I use the "standard" edition of Google Apps which does offer for free the use of Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

Docs is horribly uninteresting. FCKEditor has more formatting options than Google Docs. It's not an office competitor in my mind.

Spreadsheets is a bit better, but 2G is plenty of email space for my small business.

Another nice editor is FCKeditor. At least for me it worked better than all the rest that I had to test and it was all of it available under the LGPL. If I remember properly, some parts (plugins) for TinyMCE were only under a commercial license.

1^{1/2} in HTML:

one way is: 11/2 and this is the way I would usually do it (with an html composer that has superscript/subscript buttons like all three different alternative composers in FastMail.FM's webmail interface).

Another way: 2

And another: 1½ (this is doable in fckeditor or in xinha using the "Insert special characters" button, see http://www.fckeditor.net/demo and http://xinha.gogo.co.nz/xinha-nightly/examples/ful l_example.html which actually has a cool equation editor :)

(I got the html entities from http://www.bigbaer.com/sidebars/entities/)

My student normally don't do these things. But then I can do the guesswork on what they mean, but I don't expect them to do the ame to understand what I say. Anyway most of my students use forums were they have an eqation editor that creates mathml (if they run winxp and can have admin privileges).

Well, there is FCKeditor. Tie that together with a decent wiki, and you have a pretty good CMS, IMHO. I know Oddmuse supports this kind of integration, and I'm sure other wiki's do, as well (I know MediaWiki has got experimental integration).

We've used the Wiki for a while now at ECONZ http://econz.com/ and it has been very useful. All it needs is someone to take control of the formatting of the site, rather than just leaving everything totally free range. The one remaining problem is the actual editing process, which MS Word users can't seem to get their heads around.

We did find FCKEditor http://www.fckeditor.net/ but that doesn't come built-in and support is beta. Mention that to the system admins, and they'll refuse to install it. Once that gets integrated, we'll be able to get even more of the staff using it.

Vik :v)

That's a very valid point. Among my friends is an extremely talented technical writer who spends her *entire working day* in Word. Recently, I coded a collaborative blog for me, her and another friend - a place for us to crack jokes, post stupid photos and generally riff off one-another's slanted sense of humor - took me about 3 hours and I used the FCKeditor for composing the blog entries.
 
You wouldn't believe her delight when she found herself able to "post something to the internet". She was all smiles for weeks, thanking me repeatedly for setting it up. She now has a huge sense of empowerment and doesn't have to know jack about any nerdly technologies / markup languages. She just goes to the post page, inserts her pictures, clicks the Post button and bam - she's "on the internet". Take my word for it when I say she is beside herself with joy.

So agreed... this feature will be well appreciated and well used by less technical people.

• Photoshop: The GIMP - how many times does this need to be said, the interface is slightly different but the gimp has most of the features of photoshop plus a few of its own.
  Why don't I do the rest of the main Adobe stuff while I'm at it:
  
  • Pagemaker: Scribus
  • Illustrator: Inkscape
  
  
• Games: Cedega - but maybe you'd be better off using a console (not as in bash you blockhead) as they're cheap and while piracy for them is a bit harder its doable if you're commited.
• Autocad: a quick search reveals two commercial solutions LinuxCAD and VariCAD and a guide to getting AutoDesk's Autocad running under wine
• Dreamweaver: NVU, Amaya, hell even fckEditor or, if you're hardcore then vi(e)macs.

Loses in MS Word-like functionality to: FCK Editor
Not much better than: Gmail Composer
Less compatibility than: Writely
Definitely not as good as: MS Office

FCKEditor is a much more mature and much better editor.

Don't think "web based", think "browser based". The app itself can be running some stripped down web server-type component, and script language interpreters like Perl and PHP... Nothing here demands Interweb connectivity... But this app in particular is not ready to take on MS Word, not even close. There are a million nice Rich Text editors out there, for example FCKeditor...

What ajaxWrite did is nothing more than most blogging applications do anymore when writing posts. ajaxWrite barely did anything, seriously. For something impressive, check out the open source FCKEditor. I have no connection with the project, but it's always the most impressive editor to me.
Regards,
Steve

Seriously, my GMail composer has more features, including spell check, just for writing an email. This ajaxWrite just took firefox's rich text editor and threw tabbed DOMs into the picture. Completely unoriginal, there are significantly more advanced open source editors like the FCKEditor out already(That's a link to their demo, not their index just fyi).
Regards,
Steve

with regards to safari support, i believe it's because safari doesnt properly support all the features needed to have wysiwyg editable content. This is why support for in-browser wysiwyg in safari is a bit hit or miss at the moment.

http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/tinymce/docs/compatib lity_chart.html

http://www.fckeditor.net/safari.html

This is web based, open source and I like the name. http://www.fckeditor.net/demo/default.html is a "u" missing

You have a point, but give this a try: http://www.fckeditor.net/demo/default.html

AJAX is working for Google fairly well right now, but it's probably not an end-all answer. Javascript is fine for writing small apps, but it's not that great of a language. And even with the distance diminishing between browsers, it's still a pain to write cross-browser code. One of the great accomplishments I've seen of javascript (besides maps.google) is the FCK editor, but even that can be slow, and takes large amounts of memory.

Looking ahead, I suspect Google knows that Javascript will eventually have to dumped. M$ already has an answer, .net. They have their browser, and they can afford not to have to worry about being cross-platform.

In the end, the web browser is not a great for doing things besides browsing the web. On top of that, with EOLAs legal suit against embedded applications, full fledged internet apps seem to be the only way to go. If Google is to survive, they need the tools and framework in order to deploy such apps.

http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/
http://dynarch.com/projects/htmlarea/
http://fckeditor.net/
http://bnl.gov/itd/htmleditor/

Get Kupu! http://kupu.oscom.org/ , or Fckeditor http://www.fckeditor.net/ , or any of the Javascript text box replacements. I don't write emails with a telegraph key, and I don't build PNG images with MS paint. Replace these awful text boxes with something less painless.

A face lift and interface switch is great, but really some of these features need to step into the new century.

Erik

Here, have a look

From my perspective, the first thing that needs to be done is add Calendaring to something like Google Mail. I think web based editors are feasable (check out FCKeditor - a lot of functinality is already there), but a calendaring system makes a heck of a lot more sense as a web based app than an office suite. It would seriously challenge Outlook. And Outlook is one of the things keeping a lot of companies on Windows.

I mean, i guess that's ok if you don't really want to do anything.

I'm sorry, do you define Word Processing and Spreadsheets as "anything"?

You've picked a very specialized type of program to complain about. Even then, however, solutions do exist. SVG is perfect for vector drawing, and Applets can be used to provide the per-pixel drawing necessary for raster image editing. The point is that *most* of what people do with their computers can be done with a web platform today. And if a need arises for something more sophisticated, I'm sure you'll be seeing standards to address the problem.

FCKeditor is a web form that provides an interface that looks just like any word processor like undo, formatting, etc etc and generates html code from input. oss too.

Something like FCKeditor?

http://www.fckeditor.net/

a very competent web-based word processor with one killer feature: "paste from word." i've tried it and it generates pretty clean html from even complicated ms word formatting. the only thing it doesn't seem to handle well is fonts, but i still think it'd be an excellent solution.

(really unfortunate name though. worse when you realize it came from the author's initials.)

http://www.fckeditor.net/

Just a thought, anyway.

On the page where he's actually looking for the donations for his "Safari Compatiblity Effort" Fundable is mentioned at the bottom with a link to his group. http://www.fckeditor.net/donate/safari/default.htm l

Forgot to say...

It uses the FCKEditor for entering new data. It has import features (CSV/XML). Soon to have optional local weather info (unobtrusive) and other custom info (from web services and rss/atom feeds)

Perhaps one day I'll add some MAPI code to suck data out of outlook/exchange (new appts and "you have x new emails").

But before that I've got a really great knowledgebase app I'm considering "opening". I don't know if there really are people using things we post on SF or if they just get lost somewhere deep (unless you got 99.9% activity).

You say "you should open source it", but I doubt much people would use them (even if they're very good).

I know there are at least two open source implementation of HTML editors.

See wikiwig for an example...

Is there any reason they couldn't use FCKeditor for this functionality?

I'm sure google wants to do their own better, but FCKeditor works really well and is simple to implement.

Things like I listed above is why I left Yahoo! for Google.

Using something like FCKeditor would enable WYSIWYG editing, so users would not have to learn the Wiki markup language. I'm not sure if it has been ported to any wiki platforms, but it should be easy enough to port to something like twiki.

I briefly looked at the demo for solmetra. It didn't work (couldn't type in the edit dialog) and even still I think FCKeditor does better at being a javascript rich content editor for HTML. Although useful, I wouldn't say either of them are a replacement for Dreamweaver.

Please, please, please, please let me send and receive exes as attachments or inside an attached zip file! Both are forbidden now.

I know, this filter catches lots of viruses, new and existing, and as such I think it's a good idea to have this filter on by default for most users - but there should be a way to disable it! As a developer I need to send exes back and forth between collaborators and partners. I'm sure many ./ readers are in a similar situation.

That, and not being able to compose mails in HTML, (it can be done VERY elegantly inside a browser - see this truly amazing editor) is what keeps me from actually using my GMail account.