What's so special about WYMEditor?

[Cattus]

Even though the subject might sound hostile I am honestly confused. What is so special about WYMEditor? No matter how I search I can't find any feature to suggest it is not just a regular WYSIWYG editor with an attached CSS to emphasize the XHTML structure being created.

Wouldn't it be better to focus on creating a competent HTML/XHTML editor with the possibility of attaching custom style sheets (for example the "WYSIWYM" stylesheet)?

[mr_lundis]

Hi Cattus and welcome to the WYMeditor forum!

I think that the main difference between WYMeditor and other "classical" WYSIWYG editors lies in philosophies behind them.

Most of the WYSIWYG editors available today attempts replicate the functionality of desktop word processors, and since most people know how to use a word processor that might not sound to bad. The problem with these editors are that they're way to powerful - they present the user with so many functions that most people just get confused. And since most of these editor also comes with "all batteries included", which of course might be good if you want to get thing up and running quickly, they're rather heavy weight. Most of these editors do generate valid (x)html, but since the content (most of the time) lacks any semantic value that doesn't really matter. If you know what you're doing this might not be a problem - but judging of what I've seen, most clients don't.

With WYMeditor we've taken another approach, trying to give the content meaning by emphasizing the document structure (which you mentioned). Things like the size, face, colour, alignment or weight of the content doesn't belong in the editor at all - the presentation should be taken care of in the stylesheet. By not including (or disabling) most presentational features WYMeditor is a whole lot more light weight and easy to use. You could say that the goal of WYMeditor is making the creation of semantic content easier, especially for people that's not all tech wizzy.

It's true that you with some modification can turn WYMeditor in to a WYSIWYG editor, and some people like that - but it is in no way the goal of this project. Same thing goes the other way around as well, It's possible to use and/or modify most WYSWIG editor in a way similar to WYMeditor as well. Some examples of that include the post editor in WordPress and editors such as widgEditor and WysiHat.

Cheers!

[Cattus]

Hi mr_lundis, thanks for the reply!

I think it's a nice concept, having dealt with TinyMCE output I know how annoying it can be to find inline style attributes (amongst other presentational stuff) in the generated (x)HTML. But in that respect I find it weird that you generate b tags (and in Webkit's case spans with font-weight bold) instead of strong tags while editing. Doesn't that make it very hard (if not impossible) to style them differently? In a more "WYSIWYM" way, i mean.

PS. I'm looking forward to a definition list implementation, although that has to be nearly impossible with the available execCommands.

[mr_lundis]

I'm aware that when the content is in designMode the mark-up is far from ideal in some browsers, at least in Firefox this is related to their designMode implementation not handling strong/em very well. You shouldn't however get any bad mark-up in the final output.

As for the future I'm experimenting with moving away from designMode in favour of a selection/range based api. This would greatly increase the control you have over the editor content, while at the same time reduce complexity in the rest of the editor code. Unfortunately there's a large number of browser bugs and differences in this area as well, making things a lot harder.