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RE: [ba-ohs-talk] More powerful web editing [was Wiki experiences?]



IE on Windows has long included the MSHTML edit component. It's a
WYSIWYG editable area.    (01)

Some applications have been taking advantage of it over the past year or
two, conditionally. For example, Radio Userland makes use of it. If
you're using IE, it presents you with the WYSIWYG editor instead of a
TEXTAREA. A radio button is presented to give the use the option to see
the underlying HTML.    (02)

Since IE 5.5, this MSHTML editor is now implemented in SPAN and DIV tags
on IE for Windows. If you set the CONTENTENTEDITABLE attribute in these
tags, then the editor turns on, and the contents of the SPAN or DIV may
be modified. You'll need JavaScript to make use of the edited content in
forms.    (03)

I've been using with reasonable satisfaction in a web content
publication application. Some minor problems need to be coded around,
such as extraneous <P> tags.    (04)

--Michael    (05)

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ba-ohs-talk@bootstrap.org
[mailto:owner-ba-ohs-talk@bootstrap.org] On Behalf Of Garold (Gary) L.
Johnson
Sent: Saturday, March 09, 2002 1:24 AM
To: ba-ohs-talk@bootstrap.org
Subject: RE: [ba-ohs-talk] Wiki experiences?    (06)

-----Original Message-----
From: cdent@burningchrome.com
 * poor editing interfaces    (07)

   I was considering the other day that a well built web browser would
   include a more full featured text editor for <textarea> form
   elements. I do not write complicated wiki pages because it is a
   pain in the butt. I could, I suppose, edit somewhere else and cut
   and paste or something similar but that raises the barriers.
   Are their editors out there which will spawn an external editor or
   embed one? I think that would change the shape of collaboration on
   the web. I use email as my primary tool for collaboration because I
   have greater access to my personal toolset there.    (08)


There are indeed editors that can substitute for the browser textarea
editors, but there aren't very many as yet. Twiki has some discussion
and some examples at
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/AppletBasedEditor
A Google search turned up only a few. There are some sophisticated tools
for web management which can edit the web directly, such as
http://www.ektron.com/ . Another approach is the one taken by Dave Winer
which he calls Manila based on Frontier and Radio Userland
http://radio.userland.com/ . This is based around XML RPC, SOAP, an
outlining editor with a scripting language, and RSS feeds. Manila
http://manila.userland.com/ is a commercial server based product which
is part of Frontier http://frontier.userland.com/ . He hosts Manila
sites at http://www.manilasites.com/ but they are no longer accepting
new sites. What I would really like to see is an editor that turns out
either XHTML or XML from a relatively WYSIWYG interface that supported
just the minimum that HTML will support and does it cleanly. Netscape
Composer is surprisingly easy to handle for small pages, but its code is
atrocious (all the hacks that predate XHTML). With this plus the ability
of the editor to generate purple numbers and maintain them under edits,
we would have a start at true electronic journaling. If we could tie
this to hacks on the mailing list server, we might be able to do the
whole thing with email, as you suggest.    (09)


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