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Bringing WYSIWYG Content Editing To Mozilla

Posted by timothy on Tue Sep 17, 2002 11:47 AM
from the comp-time dept.
whythewig writes "Over the past month two open-source wysiwyg xml editors have appeared - Xopus from Q42 and the Bitflux editor. Each of these projects tries to bring true wysiwyg editing to Mozilla. From reading various mailing lists it seems that the Wyona project has been instrumental in bringing these two projects out as open source. It also appears that both of these projects will be presented next week at the open source content management conference in Berkeley, California."
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  • i may be biased... (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by pizza_milkshake (580452) on Tuesday September 17 2002, @11:56AM (#4273923) Homepage
    ... but just because open source can do something doesn't mean it should do it.
  • Interesting but... (Score:3, Informative)

    by kawika (87069) on Tuesday September 17 2002, @12:11PM (#4274122)
    Spend about 15 minutes editing the Bitflux demo [bitfluxeditor.org] and then navigate off the page with the back button or close the window. You will silently and efficiently lose 15 minutes of work.

    This kind of thing has always been a problem in browser data entry like form posts, but now it's getting more complex and the data is becoming more precious. You can try to mitigate the issue by having an onunload handler, but most ad blockers and other apps like Proxomitron [cjb.net] disable onunload because of its abuse by pr0n and advertising.

    Perhaps if this is only used in an app that uses Mozilla technologies embedded inside it--rather than the Mozilla browser with its standard navigational options--there won't be a problem. But it sure is a problem for the demo.
  • Weblogging (Score:5, Informative)

    by seanmeister (156224) on Tuesday September 17 2002, @12:23PM (#4274248)

    I hope this technology makes it over to weblog sites like Blogger [blogger.com] and Xanga [xanga.com]. Both of those sites have excellent tools for IE, but the Mozilla versions of the same tools completely blow goats.

    Of course, there are always XUL-based alternatives like mozBlog [mozdev.org] and LiveLizard [mozdev.org], or the very excellent Composite [mozdev.org]. Composite's great - it gives you a WYSIWYG editor for any <TEXTAREA> that Mozilla encounters... using it to make this comment :-)

    • Re:Weblogging by TulioSerpio (Score:1) Tuesday September 17 2002, @03:43PM
    • Re:Weblogging by chris_mahan (Score:1) Tuesday September 17 2002, @04:16PM
  • wysiwyg? (Score:1)

    by benjamindees (441808) <slashdot@@@deesconsulting...com> on Tuesday September 17 2002, @01:21PM (#4274850) Homepage
    I thought I'd ask slashdot what wysiwyg meant, but I decided to ask Google instead and found this whatis? definition. [techtarget.com]
    • Re:wysiwyg? by tommck (Score:3) Wednesday September 18 2002, @12:47PM
      • Re:wysiwyg? by Jugalator (Score:2) Thursday September 19 2002, @06:54AM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • by uncoveror (570620) on Tuesday September 17 2002, @01:24PM (#4274877) Homepage
    If either of these is an adequate replacement for Frontpage, A lot of webmasters will finally kick Microsoft to the curb.
  • Composer (Score:2)

    by Spy Hunter (317220) on Tuesday September 17 2002, @01:38PM (#4275000) Journal
    I don't understand. Mozilla already has a WYSIWYG editor, Composer. What do these do that is different?
    • Re:Composer by Thalinor (Score:3) Tuesday September 17 2002, @04:23PM
    • Re:Composer by chregu (Score:1) Wednesday September 18 2002, @02:19AM
  • by Analog (564) on Wednesday September 18 2002, @01:57PM (#4283301)
    ...and will for the foreseeable future.

    For whatever reason the Mozilla people just don't seem to see the utility in this. Reading through the forums and bugzilla, you'll see dozens of requests for a contenteditable feature, followed by a bunch of waffling about why they can't be bothered (it's usually along the lines of "we're concentrating on end user features"). Meanwhile end users by the thousands are passing Mozilla by because it can't do this.

    I wrote an in browser WYSIWYG editor which can be invoked on any block in a page. It works beautifully. It's 90% cross platform (most of the development was done in Mozilla on Linux). However, it only functions fully in IE because there isn't any good way to create a contenteditable block in Mozilla. You can hack it in (as some projects mentioned here have done, and I've done myself), but it is hackish, doesn't work reliably, and tends to break with new Moz versions. As proof of concept it's fine, but as a production feature it just ain't there.

    Mozilla could make itself the browser of choice almost overnight for potentially millions of users just by making this possible. Why they won't is beyond me, but their stubbornness on the issue is costing them users every day.

  • Netscape... (Score:1)

    by coene (554338) on Wednesday September 18 2002, @11:26PM (#4286631)
    Last I knew, netscape has WYSIWYG HTML editing capabilities... Maybe its time for them to share? :)
  • Little Rant... (Score:1)

    by $ArgonLil (610479) on Saturday September 21 2002, @03:25PM (#4304342)
    Well, that is a little off target, but... Anyway, Composer is a nice designer, and is good enough. The Mozilla People go out of there way by doing this, unless a Gecko-based distro says they don't like Composer and want another one. As for Blogging, all the points made are correct and MozBlog is nice.
    [ Parent ]
  • by Dark Fire (14267) <clasmc&yahoo,com> on Tuesday September 24 2002, @10:17AM (#4319411)
    Why are people that post about supposed numbers from organization x saying that product y is lost z% of it's market share always post as anonymous cowards with no reference links.

    [ Parent ]
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