Gerrit Addiks
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- Dec 30, 2011
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Hello people,
In the current HTML-standard there is just the textarea without any rich text editing. Most sites want rich text editing and are using one of the WYSIWYG javascript scripts out there. This has a few downsites i see:
1. By using javascript WYSIWYG scripts, each site defines on its own how that tool(s) looks like.
I think that it is not the responsibility of the web-application to define how the tools given to the user should be designed. It is the responsibility of the overlaying software, toolkit or even the operating-system to do so.
The same goes for Java, GTK, QT, WinAPI and Cocoa defining the look of widgets for programs using these API's/toolkits.
2. Users have to learn how the editor works on nearly every site they visit. Maybe the web-designers are not noticing this, but beginners that are "not that much into cumputers" will take a while longer to figure out how these tools work when they all look different.
With at least the rich-text-editors looking (nearly) all the same on not only all programs they use, but also on most websites they visit, the web would become more beginner-friendly.
3. In javascript implemented and by (different!) browsers (and js-engines) interpreted WYSIWYG-scripts will always be huge hacks and workarounds for the missing of rich editing in normal textarea's. All of these editors i've seen by now are working by hiding the actual textarea and replacing it with a huge structure of HTML elements and CSS declarations to emulate a textarea. Just watch these scripts work in firebug or whatever you use and try to understand all the tricks used just to feel like a textarea.
That is not only an extremely inefficient way of "just making a few words bold and colorful", it also is extremely buggy and incompatible because everything the textarea can do native has to be re-implemented in javascript: line-handling, char-spacing, etc...
And these editors also often has bugs caused by ugly hacks. For example not bringing up the keyboard on iPad (cause theres no real textarea or textfield, just mocked by javascript) or missing screenreader-compatibility, just to name two. And i am sure there are more problems coming for these hacks with new devices and technologies coming in the future.
Just imagine what happens if you write a huge custom javascript interacting with an external WYSIWYG-editor (with a site working like facebook or twitter or so) and the developers of that editor stops its work on it. The editor will get incompatible with new browsers after some time and you can throw all your work out of the window and begin from scratch, because the depencies are too huge.
4. Javascript has to be on for them to work. And i see noscript (the firefox addon) on many systems. (That also means that you cannot block Ad's on sites using that editors)
I also think that it would not be such a big deal to implement a native rich-editor-textarea as most people think because most big browser-vendors already have a rich-editor:
- Mozilla has one in Thunderbird,
- Google has Google-Docs
- Microsoft has Word
- Apple has its "Mail"
They would just have to port their rich-editor into the browser and make it work with the textarea. After doing so there could also be a standard javascript-API to talk to these.
Then it would be possible to have a rich-text-editor by only doing something like this:
<textarea type="rich">...</textarea>
(Please dont rely in this exactly syntax. Its just a hint to what it could look like.)
So, what do you people think of that? Is it worth to make a feature-request to w3c (or whoever), have i missed something or is all this just bullshit?
Sincerely,
Gerrit Addiks
PS: I'm refering to rich-text-editors as all text-editors supporting that functionality (e.g. Word) and WYSIWYG only the scripts in the web. Just for the case you got confused by me using the terms "rich-editor" and "WYSIWYG" seperate.
PSS: This is my first time writing to a newsgroup, please tell me if i'm doing something wrong.
In the current HTML-standard there is just the textarea without any rich text editing. Most sites want rich text editing and are using one of the WYSIWYG javascript scripts out there. This has a few downsites i see:
1. By using javascript WYSIWYG scripts, each site defines on its own how that tool(s) looks like.
I think that it is not the responsibility of the web-application to define how the tools given to the user should be designed. It is the responsibility of the overlaying software, toolkit or even the operating-system to do so.
The same goes for Java, GTK, QT, WinAPI and Cocoa defining the look of widgets for programs using these API's/toolkits.
2. Users have to learn how the editor works on nearly every site they visit. Maybe the web-designers are not noticing this, but beginners that are "not that much into cumputers" will take a while longer to figure out how these tools work when they all look different.
With at least the rich-text-editors looking (nearly) all the same on not only all programs they use, but also on most websites they visit, the web would become more beginner-friendly.
3. In javascript implemented and by (different!) browsers (and js-engines) interpreted WYSIWYG-scripts will always be huge hacks and workarounds for the missing of rich editing in normal textarea's. All of these editors i've seen by now are working by hiding the actual textarea and replacing it with a huge structure of HTML elements and CSS declarations to emulate a textarea. Just watch these scripts work in firebug or whatever you use and try to understand all the tricks used just to feel like a textarea.
That is not only an extremely inefficient way of "just making a few words bold and colorful", it also is extremely buggy and incompatible because everything the textarea can do native has to be re-implemented in javascript: line-handling, char-spacing, etc...
And these editors also often has bugs caused by ugly hacks. For example not bringing up the keyboard on iPad (cause theres no real textarea or textfield, just mocked by javascript) or missing screenreader-compatibility, just to name two. And i am sure there are more problems coming for these hacks with new devices and technologies coming in the future.
Just imagine what happens if you write a huge custom javascript interacting with an external WYSIWYG-editor (with a site working like facebook or twitter or so) and the developers of that editor stops its work on it. The editor will get incompatible with new browsers after some time and you can throw all your work out of the window and begin from scratch, because the depencies are too huge.
4. Javascript has to be on for them to work. And i see noscript (the firefox addon) on many systems. (That also means that you cannot block Ad's on sites using that editors)
I also think that it would not be such a big deal to implement a native rich-editor-textarea as most people think because most big browser-vendors already have a rich-editor:
- Mozilla has one in Thunderbird,
- Google has Google-Docs
- Microsoft has Word
- Apple has its "Mail"
They would just have to port their rich-editor into the browser and make it work with the textarea. After doing so there could also be a standard javascript-API to talk to these.
Then it would be possible to have a rich-text-editor by only doing something like this:
<textarea type="rich">...</textarea>
(Please dont rely in this exactly syntax. Its just a hint to what it could look like.)
So, what do you people think of that? Is it worth to make a feature-request to w3c (or whoever), have i missed something or is all this just bullshit?
Sincerely,
Gerrit Addiks
PS: I'm refering to rich-text-editors as all text-editors supporting that functionality (e.g. Word) and WYSIWYG only the scripts in the web. Just for the case you got confused by me using the terms "rich-editor" and "WYSIWYG" seperate.
PSS: This is my first time writing to a newsgroup, please tell me if i'm doing something wrong.