[TYPO3-RTE] New RTE extensions?

[Joerg Wagner]

Hi Martin,

I think your position is a bit to optimistic. All HTMLArea based WYSIWYG 
editors are clumsy themselves. You will always be able to create wrong 
nesting of block quotes and overall corrupt HTML. It often ends up in 
situations where you have to have HTML knowledge to solve problems you 
encounter.

I spent a lot of time trying to make HTMLArea derivatives rock solid in
several projects (not related to TYPO3). The problem is, that you never
really succeed because the depths of the browser's editor component is 
beyond your reach. Stanislas has come a long way here (and I admire him 
for his work), but the problems still persist as they stem from bugs in 
the HTML editor components of the browsers themselves. And Stanislas has 
to provide so many checking and correcting algorithms that the RTE is a 
nightmare to configure and tends to bear new issues with each solved 
problem. TinyMCE is no better here as it also is a HTMLArea derivative. 
You can easily bring them all to the point to produce trash HTML.

The biggest nightmare of all is pasting Word text into the editors. This 
is a technique that almost all end users constantly use and it always 
leads to trouble. All cleanup routines that I have seen are more or less 
insufficient amd/or clumsy to use. They must often be triggered manually 
(which no end user will do) to reach full extent cleanup and they loose 
their teeth when other features of the RTE are enabled because they 
partially rely on generally blocking tags or tag attributes that 
unfortunatelly are needed for some features of the RTE.

The only true solution I can think of would be to connect the browser 
embedded editor components with an HTML parser implemented in JS that 
parses the structure of the generated HTML in regular intervals into an 
internal representation and then rebuilds the HTML from that parsed 
content, thus correcting existing problems and structural defects. I'm 
dreaming of implementing this for a long time but I just don't find the 
time to do it.

Actually there is at least one WYSIWYG editor that seems to follow a 
similar concept. It is called Loki: http://code.google.com/p/loki-editor/
(see also the testing links in there, if you are interested)
I checked it briefly and it looks promising but still has to many 
restrictions for me to really use it.

So the bottom line ist that there is still a lot of reason fall back a 
simple markup language like a wiki syntax as Oliver proposed instead of 
the currently available WYSIWYG editors!
- Wiki-Syntax = antiquated to use but results in clean code with no 
surprises
- WYSIWYG = the modern and intuitive way - in theory - but reality is 
far away from providing robust tools


Just my 2 cents.

Cheers, Jörg.



Martin Kutschker schrieb:
> Oliver Schröder schrieb:
>> Tapio Markula schrieb:
>>> Oliver Schröder kirjoitti:
>>> that is just a replacement of a simple textarea - there is pmk_textare
>> Thanks - I didn't know this ext.
>>
>>
>> Currently we're thinking about using an editor with a wiki like
>> formatting language.
> 
> Why do prefer a WIKI style over a WYSISWYG editor? IMHO WIKI tags and
> BBcode are just remnants of days when a true JS/DOM/AJAX editor was no
> option because browsers like Safari and Opera didn't have the
> capabilities to run them. Nowadays WIKIs and boards should move away
> from that clumsy stuff. Or do you really want to write tags in a simple
> posting? I don't.
> 
> Masi