More browser-based editing

It’s amazing! When you find a new toy…er, tool it seems that there are dozens of similar tools to explore. And of course, at least one of them has to be free and, if you’re lucky, it might be really good.

Last time, I discussed an applet that, in effect, makes s into full-featured WYSIWIG editors. The product, called Editize, was very reasonably priced. Well, I found a similar tool – htmlArea from InteractiveTools.com.

htmlArea is indeed free and it is really good – functionally it is as good as Editize although it is IE-specific (Editize is not). htmlArea is pure JavaScript and (again, like Editize) replaces fields. htmlArea allows users to:

*Format text (bold, italic, and underline).

*Change the typeface, size and color.

*Left-, center-, or right-justify paragraphs.

*Make bulleted or numbered lists.

*Indent or unindent paragraphs.

*Insert a horizontal line.

*Insert hyperlinks and images.

*Insert tables.

*View the raw HTML source.

The code (which is well documented and very neat) and its use are free under a BSD-style license.

An interesting aspect of htmlArea is that because it is pure JavaScript, you can create customized versions of the code in dynamically generated Web pages using scripting languages such as ASP.

This is a fantastic tool not only because it’s free but also because it is so functional. Next issue, we’ll look at a content management system that uses htmlArea.