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Bringing WYSIWYG Content Editing To Mozilla
whythewig writes "Over the past month two open-source wysiwyg xml editors have appeared - Xopus
from Q42 and the Bitflux editor. Each of these projects tries to bring true wysiwyg editing to Mozilla. From reading various mailing lists it seems that the Wyona project has been instrumental in bringing these two projects out as open source. It also appears that both of these projects will be presented next week at the open source content management conference in Berkeley, California."
... but just because open source can do something doesn't mean it should do it.
Spend about 15 minutes editing the Bitflux demo and then navigate off the page with the back button or close the window. You will silently and efficiently lose 15 minutes of work.
This kind of thing has always been a problem in browser data entry like form posts, but now it's getting more complex and the data is becoming more precious. You can try to mitigate the issue by having an onunload handler, but most ad blockers and other apps like Proxomitron disable onunload because of its abuse by pr0n and advertising.
Perhaps if this is only used in an app that uses Mozilla technologies embedded inside it--rather than the Mozilla browser with its standard navigational options--there won't be a problem. But it sure is a problem for the demo.
I hope this technology makes it over to weblog sites like Blogger and Xanga. Both of those sites have excellent tools for IE, but the Mozilla versions of the same tools completely blow goats.
Of course, there are always XUL-based alternatives like mozBlog and LiveLizard, or the very excellent Composite. Composite's great - it gives you a WYSIWYG editor for any <TEXTAREA> that Mozilla encounters... using it to make this comment :-)
I thought I'd ask slashdot what wysiwyg meant, but I decided to ask Google instead and found this whatis? definition.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
If either of these is an adequate replacement for Frontpage, A lot of webmasters will finally kick Microsoft to the curb.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
I don't understand. Mozilla already has a WYSIWYG editor, Composer. What do these do that is different?
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Any "webmaster" who uses Frontpage deserves a mercyless beatdown. Both Adobe GoLive and Macromedia Dreamweaver and trillions, if not bajallions, times better then Frontpage. The only WYSIWYG editor that is worse then Frontpage is NetObjects Fusion.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Mozilla is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Mozilla community when IDC confirmed that Mozilla market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all web browsers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Mozilla has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Mozilla is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Mozilla's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Mozilla faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Mozilla because Mozilla is dying. Things are looking very bad for Mozilla. As many of us are already aware, Mozilla continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Netscape 6 is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Netscape developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Mozilla is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Mozilla.org leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of Mozilla. How many users of Galeon are there? Let's see. The number of Mozilla versus Galeon posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Galeon users. Chimera posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Galeon posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Chimera. A recent article put Netscape 6 at about 80 percent of the Mozilla market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Netscape 6 users. This is consistent with the number of Netscape 6 usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Mozilla, abysmal sales and so on, Netscape went out of business and will probably be taken over by AOL who sell another troubled browser. Now AOL is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Mozilla has steadily declined in market share. Mozilla is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Mozilla is to survive at all it will be among browser dilettante dabblers. Mozilla continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Mozilla is dead.
Fact: Mozilla is dyingWYSIWIG editing is a key element of M$ Sharepoint Portal Server, and is enough of a "killer feature" to make the company I work for choose Sharepoint over alternative CMSs.
Imagine being able to WYSIWIG edit a comment on a discussion forum. No more wierd HTML tags to learn!
Isn't vi a wysiwyg xml editor? xml is a text format if I am not mistaken.
Now if you are talking about wysiwyg xhtml editors, that's a different story.
For whatever reason the Mozilla people just don't seem to see the utility in this. Reading through the forums and bugzilla, you'll see dozens of requests for a contenteditable feature, followed by a bunch of waffling about why they can't be bothered (it's usually along the lines of "we're concentrating on end user features"). Meanwhile end users by the thousands are passing Mozilla by because it can't do this.
I wrote an in browser WYSIWYG editor which can be invoked on any block in a page. It works beautifully. It's 90% cross platform (most of the development was done in Mozilla on Linux). However, it only functions fully in IE because there isn't any good way to create a contenteditable block in Mozilla. You can hack it in (as some projects mentioned here have done, and I've done myself), but it is hackish, doesn't work reliably, and tends to break with new Moz versions. As proof of concept it's fine, but as a production feature it just ain't there.
Mozilla could make itself the browser of choice almost overnight for potentially millions of users just by making this possible. Why they won't is beyond me, but their stubbornness on the issue is costing them users every day.
Unfortunately the link to the bugzilla entry about it is bookmarked on my computer at work, not here at home.
I was thought it might make it into 1.1, and will likely make it into 1.2. It doesn't appear to be in the alpha release, but the bug still says they're targeting 1.2 for it.
but just because you can post a dumbass comment doesn't mean you should.
At one time that bug said it was targeted for 0.9.7, so I don't put too much stock in that. I'd love to see it, but I'll be more surprised if it shows up than if it doesn't.
It's a shame this has been such a PITA with them; all the pieces appear to be there, they just haven't been put together. I've set out on a number of occasions to see if I could do something myself, but when you look at the sheer amount you need to learn about Mozilla internals just to get started, I just can't justify the time. Not when I have an already working alternative which is available on the OS that the majority of my customers are running anyway.
Last I knew, netscape has WYSIWYG HTML editing capabilities... Maybe its time for them to share? :)
Is there any way that the mozilla browser could somehow have a plugin for kazaa or for other peer to peer networks!!! This would allow people to just download mozilla instead of kazaa and then they could turn off popups!
and it would be much more stable and it would work on many many platforms once somebody got it working right!!!
Right now I dont' have time to work on this, studying for LSATs, but if I ever have time I will try to bug the mozilla people to incorporate this into their builds.
Just think you can browse which ever peer to peer network that you want! You could just have a window in preferences that said
kazaa
User:
Password:
kazaa Server:
and then you could just have it as a tab in the browser!
Well, that is a little off target, but... Anyway, Composer is a nice designer, and is good enough. The Mozilla People go out of there way by doing this, unless a Gecko-based distro says they don't like Composer and want another one. As for Blogging, all the points made are correct and MozBlog is nice.