Thread

I usually give clients the choice between Markdown and a WYSIWYG editor.
Editors are getting better, but there’s still a lot unwanted markup, breaks and spaces that gets introduced into the markup.

I’d say about 1 out of 3 clients can’t live without WYSIWYG, but I must say most people take to Markdown really well, once they get over the initial learning curve.

The selling point is always: copying a piece of text from another document into the textarea and presto: paragraph formatting is done! Most users only need to add a few links, some titles, maybe a bit of bold and thats it.

For some Mac users I’ve even installed Textmate (which has a bundle for Markdown) on their Macs to make it even easier.

Just finished up my first ever EE site. It was assumed that the client would want WYSIWYG and as such I spent an awful lot of time checking out all the options. In the end I found FCKEditor with CKFinder for file uploading and resizing (a godsend!) the best choice. However, as the developer of the site, I myself am not really happy at all about the amount of control that has now been handed over to the client. I am also very upset that the some pages will now not validate as XHTML Strict because of the content thats been added through the WYSIWYG editor.

So, I need to research other ways of entering text through the forms that doesn’t require WYSIWYG but gives the client enough control but not too much. I don’t want <font> tags in my markup thank you very much, and currently they can copy and paste just about anything into the textarea. Anything goes, and thats not good enough for me… however, the client is very happy with the site but I can imagine I will be checking it regularly and finding allsorts of bad formatting and bad code thats been produced.

Prepare yourself.  I suspect you’ll be finding extraneous markup all the time and wanting to clean it up.  I highly recommend Textile.  It’s a nice way of giving the client a way to input what they need and making them pay attention while doing so.  I find it to be the best case scenario at this time.

Yeah it’s best not to look too closely once you install a WYSIWYG 😉  I’m intending on staying away from them as much as I possible can from now on (I’ve installed them on a couple sites).

I used Markdown for the last couple and am reasonably happy.  Clients get very confused by that as well though - why isn’t my list working (you need a blank line before AND after or it doesn’t work).  Why isn’t my link working?

I don’t think there’s any way to win.

The truth is that WYSIWYG is not a mature web-technology yet. Its absolutely fantastic in some situations and terrible in others. There also isn’t reliable cross-browser compatibility in the popular open source tools.

Some would say that blogging itself is not a mature Web technology 😊 But my clients want WYSISYG today, and it’s been painful training them, and limiting them, and building workarounds, when there’s certainly cases where WYSISYG was exactly what’s needed.

Look at it this way: Even Microsoft Word, which has been built on for years and years by zillions of software developers, doesn’t have perfect WYSIWYG. If you wait for perfection before you include this feature in EE, you’ll be keeping us waiting a very, very long time.

TTFN
Travis

I don’t think there’s any way to win

😊

The truth is that WYSIWYG is not a mature web-technology yet. Its absolutely fantastic in some situations and terrible in others. There also isn’t reliable cross-browser compatibility in the popular open source tools.

Some would say that blogging itself is not a mature Web technology 😊 But my clients want WYSISYG today, and it’s been painful training them, and limiting them, and building workarounds, when there’s certainly cases where WYSISYG was exactly what’s needed.

Look at it this way: Even Microsoft Word, which has been built on for years and years by zillions of software developers, doesn’t have perfect WYSIWYG. If you wait for perfection before you include this feature in EE, you’ll be keeping us waiting a very, very long time.

TTFN
Travis

As mentioned by Derek at the EE 2.0 preview, hopefully these tools will be handled by the browsers someday.  I think he mentioned Webkit was experimenting with it.  IMHO, this is where the functionality needs to be.

Javascript in general is the culprit here, and we’re seeing previews of EE 2.0 with quite a bit of javascript under the hood in the CP, and with greater ties to a javascript framework for the front end. The problems with cross-browser compatibility is one reason not to give EE a native WYSIWYG (or plugging in an existing one more likely), but we’re witnessing that aversion evaporate through these other features being implemented.  Maybe sooner rather than later WYSIWYG might be an option OOB.

I think a very limited WYSIWYG would be good to include - your basic bold, italics, lists. Things like that.  Anything more than that just gets ugly.

FWIW, as an end-user I prefer not to have WYSIWYG for any serious usage simply because no WYSIWYG web interface I’ve ever worked with allows me the control over the end result that I get just writing (or more often copy-and-pasting from past similar instances where it worked) HTML code in a text editor.

The day a WYSIWYG editor can give me exactly what I want without my having to hack HTML code directly afterward, is when I’ll be happy to use one. Meanwhile I’ll pass.

But again, I’m just one end-user who started doing web pages back when even the “cutting-edge” HTML editors weren’t WYSIWYG.

But again, I’m just one end-user who started doing web pages back when even the “cutting-edge” HTML editors weren’t WYSIWYG.

McGehee, was that back in the days when the big bang was just a bright light… 😛

I kid, really. 😊

I thought that TinyMCE and others can now support code editing (without intellisense, which is a MARVEL, I have to have it)? Can you do reflection in Javascript very easily?

Personally, I would like to see an in-browser IDE with drag-n-drop controls and behaviors, possibly with a jQuery/Mootools backend. One that put out NICE XHTML. One that was as easy to use and edit configurations as MS C#.

Y’know, for the power users… 😊

Y’know, for the power users… 😊

I’m with McGehee on that one, power users don’t need no WYSIWYG. Certainly not the current crop.

Well, if you’ve never used C# or any of the visual devs to develop a windows form, for instance, it might be hard to know what I’m talking about. There are several efficiencies that work out well. I would use code generation just so I don’t have to type out controls, then customize the code as I go for what I need, usually by immediately editing it. Dreamweaver and Komodo (which is free) do the best as desktop clients for what I’m talking about, although the design aspect isn’t what I use either for.

It does work better for power users in some cases who have a lot of code/markup to author, just not when a power user uses it like a simple user would, which would be drag-n-drop-n-forget. I use it to generate code or markup that I then immediately edit usually. But, y’know, it’s not for everyone, and I had to eat the bar to get to figure that out.

BUT… It’s beside the point, as the topic is for simple clients. My simple clients demand WYSIWYG. They are petrified of HTML and have no desire (read: will not) learn to author HTML themselves… Why does an emergency planner need to learn HTML to author web content? They don’t, just the markup is often so junky, it makes power users cringe.

$.02 and a pint of ice cream. 😊

I like the way the MarkUp javascript editor looks, but I haven’t used it.

Dreamweaver and Komodo (which is free) do the best as desktop clients for what I’m talking about, although the design aspect isn’t what I use either for.

Sure, I like a decent editor (color syntax, code folding, regular expression, what have you) as much as the next guy. But we’re talking about article authoring here, and in particular HTML WYSIWYG editors that work with the EE inetrface. And there are just none that I would like to work with, in this case, not if Markdown serves all my needs.

Different people have different needs, but I can understand why there’s no such editor out of the box.

Markdown: Oh cool, like a wiki editor? There’s another thing: Wiki editing is very confusing with all the __ and ** and **{__((—stuff that seems to go on. Visually, very confusing to a layman, although, if they gave it time and were patient (hint hint), it would work out well.

Time, though, is precious. Oh so precious! Not $300 haircut precious, but it’s hard to convince a professional that they should learn what most see as tech stuff to do something that “Word just does for me.” It’s not unreasonable, I’ve come to learn.

EE default WYSIWYG: I assumed it had to do with licensing, that since EE is commercial software, they just didn’t want to mess with that end of it. It’s not hard at all to install an editor for most folks in EE, even novices. Plus, less to bother with in tech support (not community support) if it goes bonkers and starts mangling your recipes you’re trying to post.

Markdown: Oh cool, like a wiki editor?

Much easier. Seriously. So far I have had very few clients refuse to learn it.

It’s not hard at all to install an editor for most folks in EE, even novices. Plus, less to bother with in tech support (not community support) if it goes bonkers and starts mangling your recipes you’re trying to post.

It’s the other way round, I suppose: the real nightmare would be officially supporting some WYSIWYG tool, and making sure it runs on all servers and in all situations, not to mention all browsers.