Slashdot Mirror


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?"

1 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. vi wrong approach for this? by Experiment+626 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.