* InnovaStudio WYSIWYG Editor
Anytime that you need to enable editing of content by end users in a Web application you run up against the problem of just how to make it work. Developers used to resort to standard HTML forms and supported formatting by allowing embedded tags.
Today most sophisticated Web applications replace a client-side textarea tag with JavaScript or Ajax code to make more-or-less full WYSIWYG editing possible. One of the slickest of these tools I’ve come across is InnovaStudio WYSIWYG Editor (IWE).
IWE provides full word processing features including formatting for text (fonts, size, colors, effects, etc.), paragraphs (indentation, word spacing, and so on), lists, boxes and tables.
IWE also supports previews of fonts in dropdowns, is intelligent about Cascading Style Sheet formatting (e.g. uses spans and attributes rather than specific formatting tags and supports internal and external style sheets), and has bookmark support, a color picker, and a Web asset manager.
You can preview your edits at various screen sizes, review source code (tags and attributes are colored) and the entire interface is configurable. IWE can also be integrated with spell checkers such as ieSpell and NetSpell.
IWE is server-independent and operates cross-browser (compatible with IE5.5++ on Windows and the latest versions of Netscape, Mozilla and Firefox on Windows and Mac OS X) written completely in JavaScript. Priced at $70 per developer the IWE license also allows for limited royalty-free distribution.
Let me conclude by noting that the only issue to keep in mind with browser-based WYSWYG editing is that it can go wrong. At Network World, we use a WYSIWYG browser editor called TinyMCE from Moxiecode to edit blog entries managed by Drupal and more than once I’ve lost content because my connection failed.
The problem wasn’t, per se, with TinyMCE. With all of these browser-based editors if anything does go wrong and you didn’t have the presence of mind to make a copy of the content in the edit area before you hit the “Submit” button, you will be, at best, annoyed.
A mechanism for autosaving edited content is a feature that hopefully one of these editing system vendors will eventually provide. Let me know if you should find one before I do.
