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WYSIWYG Editor for Touchup?

PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2011 1:02 pm
by MichaelW
I usually use SeaMonkey's Composer for quick WYSIWYG touch-up -- typos, missing or wrong punctuation, etc -- but it will sometimes put unwanted code in a previously validated page. Can anyone recommend a WYSIWYG editor that simply does what it is told and no more?

Thanks.

Re: WYSIWYG Editor for Touchup?

PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2011 11:59 pm
by MikeGale
A long time ago I had a good look at WYSIWYG. I even built a rudimentary editor, that was in production for about a decade.

My conclusion was that WYSIWYG is pretty much guaranteed to be unreliable. My (long ago) review of every product I laid my hands on, confirmed that none of them could be trusted. (And because of the WYSIWYGness you simply can't easily see the unacceptable things they might do. I daresay the WYSIWYGness had encouraged the developers not to be thorough.)

My conclusion was, if it counts edit source (WYSIWYN).

I'd love to see something mentioned here that works, but I'm not holding my breath. (My observation is that the editors usually parse the source and work with DOM, not source. On the round trip source->DOM->source it's very hard to not have changes, unless you made that source in the first place).

Re: WYSIWYG Editor for Touchup?

PostPosted: Fri Jun 10, 2011 9:04 am
by Albert Wiersch
While I have not done any testing, I would agree with Mike that using WYSIWYG editors will potentially (and likely) cause changes in the source due to how it converts HTML to the visual format (& DOM) and then back again. I would think it would be pretty difficult to have a decent WYSIWYG editor with no risk/worry of changing the source... but if there is one, I'd like to know! I don't think it's impossible, just difficult.