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Better Browsers for Text & Form Handling?
Dan Warne asks: "I work as a web content administrator for one of the big newspapers in Australia. The front end of our content manager is browser-form based. Yet browsers all have horrible text editing features; neither Mozilla nor IE support search-and-replace, something desperately needed for anyone who works with a lot of form content. Aside from using a standalone text editor, what software out there provides a better browser-based solution for people who work with text in web forms a lot?"
Pick up a book on Javascript, and write your own! The 'Search and Replace' feature that you mentioned would take an experienced programmer only minutes to write - and if you're just beginning, you could probably have something working before the day is over. My guess is that you'll probably save a bunch of money, and support costs, over using some proprietary third-party utility.
-- Kleptotherapy: Helping those who help themselves.
Right now, I'm writing this with `vim`, having hit ^Xe in the textbox that `lynx` opened up. I have all the unimaginable power of vim at my disposal. :)
I also have high hopes for someday being able to use vimpart as a textarea editor in Konqueror - that alone would get me to switch over from Moz.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
For CCMs using editor applets in place of the standard textarea can be a solution. There are lots of them, and they also support html ~wysiwyg formatting...
I am a regular Opera user, and I was all set to say "Hey, with Opera, I can find and replace in form fields!"
;)
Sadly, I just tried it and I cannot. Is this really such a difficult feature to implement, or has nobody really brought it up before now? Certainly in my years of using a browser I've not needed this feature (otherwise I would have known that Opera doesn't do it) -- but now that I know the feature is lacking, I want it.
Can't find it now, but it provides a word processor popup for text areas that will then fill the text area with html.
And having seen the speed of the changes in the latest betas of Opera 7.20 I can guess that feature will be ready in a matter of a couple of weeks or less.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
searching:
./*.html
find / -iname index.html
grep -e "stuff to find"
replacing:
sed -e "s/one/two/" index.html >newindex.html
back in the day we didnt have no old school
Unless there is one already, write your own or hire someone to write it.
I've recently been using w3m a lot more recently and highly recommend it. It supports a number of vi-like and emacs-like keystrokes if you are into that kind of thing. It also has a number of other noteworthy features:
- Although it's console based, it can display images. This is a really neat trick. It's actually using X11 to overlay images on the console. It even works when w3m is in a remote terminal, as long as X11 is forwarded back.
- It supports tabbed browsing.
- SSL support
- It supports tables and frames, so it generally renders pages decently.
- It has "incremental search", like Mozilla's type-ahead-find.
- Generally excellent keyboard navigation
- It's easy to switch to an external graphical browser if you need one. I use w3m on my Mac, and just press "M" to have it open the current page in Safari.
- It allows you to use your editor-of-choice to edit textareas. I imagine you could use a graphical editor with it
I use it frequently as a general purpose browser now, switching to a browser that supports graphics and javascript if I need to.
w3m seems to be a generation ahead of 'lynx'. It's quite impressive.
Here's a nice one that generates html that can be submitted via a form. It can paste from MS Word and is very easy to use. It has built in image uploading capabilities. It's really a full on wysiwyg html editor that is web based. It currently only works under IE, however.
FCKeditor
I seem to remember reading something sometime about someone who had made a vi-plugin for mozilla? So that any actually spawned a vi-instance, bringing you all the excellent vi-feats. :p
Anyone else remember seeing this? Perhaps it was someones wish-feature, as I can't seem to find anything about it on google
OmniWeb has find&replace, as well as a bunch of other handy text handling features for forum input (inline spell checking, extensible functions with the services menu, etc).
It's MacOSX only though, of course, if you're working in the print industry getting a mac to run it on shouldn't be too hard.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
I have to use inhouse applications for order tracking, trouble tickets, one thing that they dont seem to do, remember the text I filled into forms.
So, I have to enter data again, and again. Text input has always been a problem on browser. I have some applications that auto-fill, but things like "date" should be autofilled.
A browser with advanced text input features, would really be useful.
Whatever happened to FILE uploads?
YAW.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
Don't get me wrong, I love vim. However... most of the suggestions here have been along the lines of "vi in a browser" type ideas. This is excellent for power users, but might not suitable for the newspaper staff in question to do their content editing
vi (and emacs) have more wonderful features than almost anyone would ever use, but the learning curve that comes with this can be intimidating for some. Are the people who will be using this system tech types, or journalists? If the latter, they probably won't think that ":%s/Linux/GNU\/Linux/g" is quite as intuitive as a dialog box with boxes labelled "Find" and "Replace with".
Depending on the proficiency of the intended users, they may well be better off with some kind of plugin / applet / whatever that resembles Wordpad than trying to master an editor with hundreds of not-so-intuitive keystrokes and commands.
If you don't like java and your clients are all Windows or Mac users then you may want to consider shockwave. Shockwave scripting language (lingo) is fairly powerful (once you get to know it) with editing text and text assets in the shockwave movie can be used to produce html or rtf data that could be save and/or uploaded to where they need to be.
Of course, there's no linux support (yet) for shockwave and I'm probably a bit biased since I've been doing shockwave work for 3 years straight.
DONT PANIC
Check out Mozilla Firebird and install the Mozex extension.
Then you can easily associate external editors for textareas. If that doesn't suit your needs you could always write your own extension. (It's pretty easy, I wrote my first one, Image Zoomer, in about 2 days last week.)
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
If you did that, then people could spell check their Slashdot posts. What are you an anarchist?
Having come from a graphic design background, I've developed a pet peve about using a program for something other than for what it was intended when there are programs out there whose strength is that particular function. In design, it manifests itself by people using Quark as a Word Processor. Then there are accountants that use Excel as a Word Processor. In your case, you're trying to use a program designed to surf the web to edit text. What is with the fear of word processors or dedicated text editors? They are there for a reason and they do what they do well (and what they weren't designed to do poorly >ahemahem). I think that if you settle on a good external text editor and integrate that into your workflow, you'll find that your productivity will increase and you'll be less frustrated in the long run.
Mozilla extensions can do almost anything you want
Consider:
Electrix -- not developed anymore, but still functional. From its site: "To edit the text in a textarea, hit Ctrl-e. The editor you set up will appear. Once you exit the editor, Electrix will write the changes back to the textarea."
Or htmlArea -- this works within browser and suports IE beside Mozilla; but of course you don't want users to use it, aren't you?
When in doubt, go to the library. - Ron Weasley in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
I'm amazed that nobody has mentioned this already: many blog systems support an XMLRPC api. This means that nice clients can easily be written for many different platforms. Maybe you should look into something like that.
Movabletype.org says they support "Blogger and MetaWeblog XML-RPC APIs".
disclaimer: I'm an XML-RPC fan, but have NO experience with blog servers or clients.
It uses a helper application within your browser to edit text in the editor of your choice.
Even if you are not using Zope I am sure you could adapt this to other app servers.
Also WebDav provides complementary facilities and is available from within ie on the client WebAdmin. This approach will require that your server speaks webdav too.
Thanks everyone for the suggestions, especially those people who suggested Mozilla Plugins as a solution. (I had previously searched for these without much luck).
I agree totally that web browsers are an inappropriate front-end for content management and editing, but you've got to work with what you've got. Unfortunately a lot of content management systems do use a web front end.
Take HTML as an analogous example. It was never designed for precise page design and layout, but more for structuring content rationally. But it is used for page layout through hundreds of kludgy hacks and workarounds that people have worked out over the years.
Without naming the media mogul that I ultimately work for, let's just say he's one of the richest men in the world, and I don't think he's about to shell out to replace his web-browser form based ocntent management system which runs all his newspapers worldwide.
It's a growing problem, really. It's not just publishing -- corporate intranets are often web form driven, and you've got to pity the poor plods who have to enter in content via standard web forms.
It does surprise me, however, that no-one has made a web browser that is designed for web-based content management, with more extensive text tools.
Of course, if you use OS X on Mac, you get 'services', which allow just about anything to be done to a block of data on a page, as long as the program supports service, and you have installed the correct service.
For example, there's a service for OS X called "SmartWrap" which will rewrap hard-wrapped text in any program that supports services.
It's a brilliant implementation, but here's the thing: I have to use a Pentium II-350 with a free web browser on it to admin the content. The IT across the entire corporation is standardised on Wintel.
You'll need to add some additional code to allow for features such as search & replace, but all that'd take is a few lines of ECMAScript/javascript...
We can do that right now by adding the OOo doc as a frame and leaving a form with an "upload" button in another frame, but that's kind of clumsy. With KDE 3.2 and KOffice 1.3 (stably by 1.4, I expect), OOo docs will be embeddable as KParts so it should in theory be simple enough to integrate that, maybe a frame with "save" and "revert" buttons on it and another with the doc itself.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...you slacker, I think you want definition #2.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
( ) Parentheses or round brackets
< > Brokets or angle brackets (type < >)
[ ] Brackets or square brackets
{ } Braces or curly brackets
&laqou; » Guillemet, angle quotes or chevron brackets (real ones thoughtfully ripped by slash)
I'm betting that you used brokets, as in <TEXTAREA>, but without escaping them, yes?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Spend a few days writing a rich text editor that supports find/replace and optionally HTMLish attributes like bold, italic, underscore, blockquote, maybe even super/subscript. You'll be a hero, the world will beat a path to your door. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
We use Ektron's eWebEditPro, which has an XML-based customization scheme. You can allow users to post HTML, or simply allow them to do some more advanced things w/ plain text.
The facts have a liberal bias. --The Daily Show
See: lists.kde.org for an implementation in KHTML.
KDE Developer George Staikos heard your prayers ;) . See http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=10644750911077 0&w=2.
Kudos to KDE team once again ! .
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
There is a product called htmlarea which is fully cross browser compatible and doesn't write crap HTML code like all the IE only ones.
The real funky thing about this one is that there are spell checker and tables modules available for it.
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
*This is the cute bunny virus, please copy this into your sig so it can spread
I realise that most WCMS programs use web forms, but have you considered looking into how difficult it'd be to swap out the front end? Have you contacted the vendor of the software? Perhaps they have some suggestions?
A lot of WCMS vendors work on collaborative systems, so if there were some way to integrate with Macromedia's system (Contribute) or else some other interface that perhaps modifies the browser either via plug-in or proprietary interface (since you're on Wintel), that might be the best way to go about it.
The next question would be to find out what the anticipate life-cycle for the app is and what they're looking at doing for the next cycle, whether an upgrade or potential switch.
Wish you the best on it, since it really is a tough situation.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
If a text-based browsers is an acceptable option, no browser has a
better built-in text editor than Emacs/w3. It's fully extensible,
fully scriptable, and closer to fully featured than any other editor
available today. The more advanced features do have a learning curve,
but what fully-featured thing doesn't?
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Bookmarked the parent. That'll come in handy.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Take a look at the Safari browser on OS X. It offers MS-Word-style spellcheck (red dotted underlines) for all form fields, if you enable it by right-clicking on any field. I think you may find difficulty locating a browser with search-and-replace within form fields, though. I can't say I have run across one yet.
Hold on. Last time I've checked Xemacs with w3 mode it showd me some gifs and jpegs. Javascript might be not up to date (well, that time it didn't work at all). But the real problem of (X)Emacs/w3 is that the developers dropped it. Too bad.
Less is more !