Slashdot Mirror
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."
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 :-)
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?" `":" #");}
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
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.
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.
No. :-)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Actually, if we all kept this philosophy in mind, featuritis and code bload wouldn't be such a big problem.