3 ms·

In 2004 or thereabouts we were building custom in-house CMS and wanted to make easy to use wysiwyg editor with just a select features: bold, italic, links, imag

In 2004 or thereabouts we were building custom in-house CMS and wanted to make easy to use wysiwyg editor with just a select features: bold, italic, links, images, headings. I mean, how hard can it be, right? Oh boy. After much developing and cursing we just defaulted to TinyMCE or whatever it was at that time. 1/10, would not try again.

ksec 5y ago
And it is still pretty much the same in 2022.
aasasd 5y ago
FCKEditor was a bit cleaner, IMO. But only marginally. Also, there was ‘WYMeditor’, which displayed the semantic structure of text instead of a WYSIWYG rendition—so I kept meaning to try it out some time, but never got around to it in earnest. Textile and Markdown took hold before I again had a need for a complex editor, which is probably for the better. (Now, if we convince all the ‘whitepaper’¹ authors that their incredibly complex layout of ‘a wall of text and occasional pictures’ doesn't require PDF and that I don't have a 14" portrait-oriented screen—that would be great.) (¹ as opposed to greenpaper, I guess.)
- ihateolives 5y ago
  I wish we could've used Textile back then, I used it for my personal blog, but it was no go since the users were Word-people who literally made html pages with Word and tried to upload those to CMS. Oh, that brings back memories... Trying to clean up a mess that resulted from users pasting rich content from Word to our content editor and then wondering why it broke their site from certain point onwards.
nicoburns 5y ago
Ah, that was a dark time for WYSIWYG editing on the web. I actually made my own back in that era [0] (well a little later, but when TinyMCE and CKEditor were still the goto solutions), and getting it to work cross-browser when IE6 was still a thing and had no dev tools was an absolute nightmare. [0]: https://github.com/nicoburns/ghostedit https://github.com/nicoburns/ghostedit

ksec 5y ago

And it is still pretty much the same in 2022.

aasasd 5y ago

FCKEditor was a bit cleaner, IMO. But only marginally. Also, there was ‘WYMeditor’, which displayed the semantic structure of text instead of a WYSIWYG rendition—so I kept meaning to try it out some time, but never got around to it in earnest. Textile and Markdown took hold before I again had a need for a complex editor, which is probably for the better. (Now, if we convince all the ‘whitepaper’¹ authors that their incredibly complex layout of ‘a wall of text and occasional pictures’ doesn't require PDF and that I don't have a 14" portrait-oriented screen—that would be great.) (¹ as opposed to greenpaper, I guess.)

ihateolives 5y ago
I wish we could've used Textile back then, I used it for my personal blog, but it was no go since the users were Word-people who literally made html pages with Word and tried to upload those to CMS. Oh, that brings back memories... Trying to clean up a mess that resulted from users pasting rich content from Word to our content editor and then wondering why it broke their site from certain point onwards.

nicoburns 5y ago

Ah, that was a dark time for WYSIWYG editing on the web. I actually made my own back in that era [0] (well a little later, but when TinyMCE and CKEditor were still the goto solutions), and getting it to work cross-browser when IE6 was still a thing and had no dev tools was an absolute nightmare. [0]: https://github.com/nicoburns/ghostedit https://github.com/nicoburns/ghostedit