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What Do You Use For Complex Inline HTML Editing?
rmpotter asks: "I'd like to provide WYSIWYG HTML editing within a number of HTML forms. I've looked at a number of free and commercial Java applets that purport to do this. Almost all of them were buggy/slow/less-functional. Frankly, the closest thing I've found is an IE-only solution at SiteExperts.com. It loads quickly, seems very stable and editing features can be added or removed as needed. Seems to me you need this functionality to build usable net/intranet apps. Are there any Mozilla examples worth looking at yet? Or a better Java applet that supports version 4 browsers? Anyone out there found a solution?"
On modern Windows systems, the simple WYSIWYG HTML editor that makes up FrontPage Express and the editor in Outlook Express should be embeddable as an ActiveX control.
And if your website is built with Lotus Domino (yeah, right), Domino's web interface includes an equally nice richtext-as-HTML editing widget implemented in Java.
You haven't said what audience you need this for or how complex the HTML needs to be. Tables? Forms? Styles? Is it for public use, paid customer use, or for an intranet? If it's an intranet, obviously you can go to a commercial or single-platform solution. For general public use, probably not.
Another interesting approach if this is for an serious content-management system is to use DDE (or its equivalent) through a plugin or a signed applet to launch a full-fledged HTML editor or word processor, pipe the content to it, and pipe the content back via the DDE/etc. link upon a "save" or "close" action in the editor.
Ektron's eWebEditPro is a popular add-on to Content Management systems for WYSIWYG HTML editing. It has a few really nice features, such as the ability to create well-formed XML (including XHTML). Works in IE and NS, and Ektron has done a good job of making it easy for Webmasters and System Integrators to include it in their apps. PDF data sheet is here.
bp
ps it would help if you told us what the goal was. asking us for a recommendation on which hammer is best without telling us any details is useless. especialy if what you really need is a wrench
What about a web-based front-end to an email system, a user-written encyclopedia, etc.? What about a web-based personal home page creation tool (think GeoCities)?
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
As soon as we find a good one, please build it into Slash so we can use it for comment posting.
Daniel
FrontPage gives users the impression that they can write and publish Webby stuff... and as long as nobody looks too closely, the HTML is just about passable.
I look closely at the HTML documents I review and translate. If it comes from ForntPage, I often have to correct the HTML as well!
When I first started doing Webby stuff, about four years ago, I went on a four-day training course. One of the things the instructor was keen on, was that we try a "WYSIWYG" editor, then look at the generated code, and then directly code the HTML the "right way"...
Since then, I've tried several "WYSIWYG" editors (Hot Metal, Netscape Page Composer, FrontPage) and I've also had quite a bit of experience writing documents in FrameMaker and converting to HTML with WebWorks Publisher (but also writing in Applix, MS-Word, and others, and exporting the file as HTML)...
As far as I'm concerned, none of the "WYSIWYG" editors is any good! The "WYSIWYG" part falls down very soon... you have to start doing "Insert tag" and coding the things by hand in any case... and what you see in the editor is very, very rarely anything like what you (or your users) see in a browser.
As for drafting the text in FrameMaker and converting, well that's an entirely different philosophy. Use Frame to make documents for paper, and generate Webby stuff from the basic Frame files. More or less like compiling object code (HTML) from source code (Frame)... The point is that the destination medium (web or paper) behaves in a certain way, so you convert the format of the message (contents of the Frame file) to suit...
If your users are likely to need to produce good-quality Webby stuff, that needs to be portable, you should teach them how to code by hand.
If they only need to publish small documents at infrequent times, supply them with a restricted set of paragraph and character formats for a word processor (StarOffice, ApplixWare, or some other) and use the application's HTML Export feature.
I've been much in the same boat as you. I've known HTML but was keen on trying out some of the WYSIWYG editors out there, and I did. What I found was that all of them produced code that was incorrect, some with misplaced tags or other whatnot. Especially the problem of broken JavaScript or include tags whenever editing inside such an editor - what a headache!
I have come up with my own solution to the problem, however. My father manages the content of what has now become a rather large site (about 2 new articles per week over the last 2 years). It is indexed by a script that I've created in Perl. He uses Netscape Composer (the editor I found with the fewest issues). Out of the mess it creates, while indexing the documents I've got about a page's worth of regular expressions to fix the errors (basically, I added them as I encountered them) in tags and links, and finally copy the documents from their working directory into the "live" area.
It's pretty custom right now, so it won't be of much use to anyone else, but this script's been a lifesaver over the last while. It was written after I became extremely agitated over fixing all the stupid errors, added to the code I already had which ran through the directory tree to create the index pages used to navigate the site. Takes a couple minutes to run (the server's a P75), but I only run it once a week, and it works great!
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.