Another WYSIWYG HTMLarea editor and an Ajax app

Today we have two unrelated but, we hope, quite fascinating items for you:

Item 1: Following on from my previous newsletter about a WYSIWYG browser-based editing replacement for HTMLarea I mentioned a tool in this category that is used at Network World called TinyMCE from Moxiecode.

TinyMCE is a minimal approach to creating a WYSIWYG editor requiring only two lines of code to be added in the page where the editor is required. It works with MS IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera 9 Preview 1 and it is skinnable and free.

But there’s one feature in particular that will appeal to many Web applications designers: You can constrain the output of TinyMCE to block elements you don’t want and enforce the use of attributes you do.

TinyMCE is also supported by two other products from the same group: MCFileManager which provides a file browser for integration with TinyMCE (PHP version, and a .Net version) and MCImageManager, an image manager for TinyMCE (PHP version, and .Net version).

Item 2: Cumprimentos. Meu nome e marca. Que esta acontecendo? Not bad for someone who doesn’t speak Portuguese, eh? Would you prefer that in German? OK: “GruBe. Mein Name ist Markierung. Was geschieht?”

Am I versatile or what? Well, I am if I have access to tools like AjaxTrans. As you might guess from the name AjaxTrans is a translation system that is based on Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) and provides a translation service. The actual translations are done in real time using BabelFish and Google’s Translate as back-end engines.

This demo was created as a proof of concept of real-time translation and on the same site is another proof of concept, a version of AjaxTrans, which while it translates, also scans the input text and displays targeted ads alongside the translation (frankly ads turn it into a proof of concept I could do without, but it is kind of clever).

The author of these neat Ajax apps is Joel Parish – a 15-year-old sophomore attending school in Southern California!