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WYSIWYG HTML Editors - What You See Is (Not) What You Get

WYSIWYG authoring sounds like a great idea, but for a number of reasons most WYSIWYG editors don't quite deliver on the promise. Here at Ingeniux, we have always focused on the separation of content and presentation as a foundational aspect of our XML-based WCM system. However, both from a freedom of design and ease of use standpoint, WYSWIYG content authoring functionality is crucial to empowering content authors to build quality web pages.

Most WCM tools provide WYSIWYG editing with an installed client application (like a Java applet or Microsoft ActiveX control), using Flash, or through a JavaScript/HTML application built-on top of the the web browser's built-in WYSIWYG editing capabilities. Installed controls are a non-starter in this day and age. Ingeniux has invested 1,000s of hours in building zero-footprint web applications for our CMS platform. Flash until very recently was also a non-starter as it did not support truly complex HTML documents. For the purveyor of a zero-footprint web application, this leaves a Javascript editor built on the features of the host web browser.

Javascript WYSIWYG editors have a heavy handicap. They must operate in a variety of environments (IE, Safari, Firefox, etc) that provide varying levels of support for WYSIWYG features and functionality. In these varied environments the editor application is expected to behave consistently and provide high quality output. In addition, most WCM systems (including Ingeniux CMS) are targeting content output that follows modern web standards like XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Unfortunately, the WYSIWYG features of most underlying browsers were designed during the days of HTML 4.0 or even HTML 3.2. This HTML centric approach means that when applying a color and size to some selected text, the web browser adds a font tag around the selected text. Font tags and XHTML don't match. Therefore, each JavaScript editor must take this antiquated, ugly content and convert it into clean XHTML.

Content cleaning and compliance is a big issue again mapping back to the requirements of consistency in disparate operating environments. Ingeniux has searched long and hard for a suitable WYSIWYG editor that meets our requirements for XHTML compliance, content import, rich media, link, and document management tools, and an architecture that plans for the future rather then applying band-aids to the legacy of the past. After an exhaustive search and evaluation, we selected TinyMCE (http://tinymce.moxiecode.com) as our preferred WYSIWYG editor. TinyMCE is richly featured, well designed to support all of our web browser environments, and it offers a broad community who rapidly develop new modules to improve the content authoring experience in Ingeniux CMS. Based on the enormous positive feedback from our current customers using 2 of our previous editors, it is clear that this was an excellent choice.

WYSIWYG editing may still be largely dependant on the browser of your choice, but Ingeniux CMS and TinyMCE bring WCM one step closer to realizing this goal.

Posted by Nathan Eggen