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."

Comments

Interesting but...

[kawika]

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.

Weblogging

[seanmeister]

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 :-)

Re:Composer

[Thalinor]

first of all, they do have the potential to be cross-browser (ie 6 and mozilla). second, thanks to the built-in schema validation for xopus your users cannot even apply "wrong" text styles etc, because you can only apply styles that are pre-defined in the stylesheets.

finally, xopus is arguably more "wysiwyg" than most editors who are nothing more than textareas with some formatting buttons. for instance, the NYT of switzerland, neue zürcher zeitung (nzz) uses xopus to enter articles. journalists see how their articles flow on the page while they are entering it. quite powerful.

hope this helps,

-gregor

Re:wysiwyg?

[tommck]

Am I the only one that is surprised that a /. reader doesn't know what WYSIWYG is?

T