4 ms·

> Clients always want wysiwyg editors and you know that's bad for them Not a fan of wysiwyg, but a bit arrogant no?

by ben336 12y ago

ics 12y ago
Or tongue-in-cheek.
Raphmedia 12y ago
No. All the wysiwyg I used are very bad. Even as a dev knowing what's up, I wouldn't use them. What you see is very pretty, <w:ptab alighment="RIGHT" relativeto="MARGIN" leader="DOT">but what you get is very ugly </w:ptab>
- alextgordon 12y ago
 The only person reading that markup is a computer... If it works, use it. If it's visually broken, don't. All else being equal, pick the best user experience (i.e. not the one that breaks when grandma types in an asterisk).
 - Raphmedia 12y ago
 I wish. But really, it mess up a lot of thing. Styles may be wrongly applied, javascript may bind to the wrong dom elements, etc. Most of the time, everything look really good in the wysiwyg box but breaks in the website. That empty tag might have a padding that adds extra whitespace on the website. Perhaps you added a <h1> or <h2> tag without noticing and this empty tag gets added to your navigation as an empty element. I worked on a project where the user was using and modifying the same content page for the last 5 years. The page was glitchy as hell. Trust me, it didn't even look like HTML anymore. Hell, at first glance the whole HTML code looked like a big regex.
 - m_mueller 12y ago
 I really have to wonder why wysiwyg is so difficult on the web when it's a solved problem on Desktop. I recommend looking at what markup iWorks Pages produces when you export to html - it's quite clean. Why not making a simple wysiwyg that 1) doesn't do any styles, it just operates using pure html tags. So no font for example. 2) cleans up empty tag as soon as possible (but at the latest when you hit save). 3) treats newlines as follows: single newline = , double newline = new tag. Regarding tags there is exactly two states: Having one open and having none open. Does it really have to be that hard?
 - alextgordon 12y ago
 This is pretty much what CKEditor does if you configure it to do that (simple toolbar, enter inserts ) Thinking about it, the correct thing to do is to use for each line, but allow the user to specify single or double spacing. This is approximately what real word processors do, because often you will want one line to be left-aligned (e.g. to show English text) and the immediately next line to be right aligned (e.g. to show Hebrew text).
- tracker1 12y ago
 I have a set of utils I use to sanitize input to markdown... It's relatively limited, but it works for my needs. You could present WYSIWYG to the user, but still have a preview that sanitizes and presents the sanitized output. I'm using this for import/export description fields... Then I replace h1/h2 with h3. It works pretty well. https://www.npmjs.com/package/cc-text-utils https://www.npmjs.com/package/cc-text-utils
hasenj 12y ago
The developer always knows what's right for you.
drrotmos 12y ago
Not at all. WYSIWYG never has worked well, and it's working even worse when your product is multi-channel or responsive, or mobile-first. Sure, if you stick to simple things like paragraphs or italicizing text, it kinda sorta works, but people tend to go crazy with WYSIWYG editors trying to design an article layout of a text with them. Not a great idea.

> Clients always want wysiwyg editors and you know that's bad for them Not a fan of wysiwyg, but a bit arrogant no?

by ben336 12y ago

> Clients always want wysiwyg editors and you know that's bad for them Not a fan of wysiwyg, but a bit arrogant no?

ics 12y ago

Or tongue-in-cheek.

Raphmedia 12y ago

No. All the wysiwyg I used are very bad. Even as a dev knowing what's up, I wouldn't use them. What you see is very pretty, <w:ptab alighment="RIGHT" relativeto="MARGIN" leader="DOT">but what you get is very ugly </w:ptab>

alextgordon 12y ago
The only person reading that markup is a computer... If it works, use it. If it's visually broken, don't. All else being equal, pick the best user experience (i.e. not the one that breaks when grandma types in an asterisk).
- Raphmedia 12y ago
 I wish. But really, it mess up a lot of thing. Styles may be wrongly applied, javascript may bind to the wrong dom elements, etc. Most of the time, everything look really good in the wysiwyg box but breaks in the website. That empty tag might have a padding that adds extra whitespace on the website. Perhaps you added a <h1> or <h2> tag without noticing and this empty tag gets added to your navigation as an empty element. I worked on a project where the user was using and modifying the same content page for the last 5 years. The page was glitchy as hell. Trust me, it didn't even look like HTML anymore. Hell, at first glance the whole HTML code looked like a big regex.
 - m_mueller 12y ago
 I really have to wonder why wysiwyg is so difficult on the web when it's a solved problem on Desktop. I recommend looking at what markup iWorks Pages produces when you export to html - it's quite clean. Why not making a simple wysiwyg that 1) doesn't do any styles, it just operates using pure html tags. So no font for example. 2) cleans up empty tag as soon as possible (but at the latest when you hit save). 3) treats newlines as follows: single newline = , double newline = new tag. Regarding tags there is exactly two states: Having one open and having none open. Does it really have to be that hard?
 - alextgordon 12y ago
 This is pretty much what CKEditor does if you configure it to do that (simple toolbar, enter inserts ) Thinking about it, the correct thing to do is to use for each line, but allow the user to specify single or double spacing. This is approximately what real word processors do, because often you will want one line to be left-aligned (e.g. to show English text) and the immediately next line to be right aligned (e.g. to show Hebrew text).
tracker1 12y ago
I have a set of utils I use to sanitize input to markdown... It's relatively limited, but it works for my needs. You could present WYSIWYG to the user, but still have a preview that sanitizes and presents the sanitized output. I'm using this for import/export description fields... Then I replace h1/h2 with h3. It works pretty well. https://www.npmjs.com/package/cc-text-utils https://www.npmjs.com/package/cc-text-utils

hasenj 12y ago

The developer always knows what's right for you.

drrotmos 12y ago

Not at all. WYSIWYG never has worked well, and it's working even worse when your product is multi-channel or responsive, or mobile-first. Sure, if you stick to simple things like paragraphs or italicizing text, it kinda sorta works, but people tend to go crazy with WYSIWYG editors trying to design an article layout of a text with them. Not a great idea.