The so-called “Rich Text Editors” are used extensively over the web nowadays, especially in content publishing systems. Of course rich text editor mentioned here won’t mean the desktop software. They’re invented to solve the problem that standard HTML lacks a rich text editor component. JavaScript and basic XHTML technologies are used to create more powerful text edit controls with styling and formatting functions.
I started to pay attention to rich text editor implementations since I discovered WordPress. It bundles TinyMCE with it. However many people including me were not satisfied with the default customization of WordPress, so I got a plugin called EditorMonkey. I don’t quite remember what it was like because I haven’t used it for a long time and the author’s site is down for the time being. But I do remember that it provided two editors, FCKeditor and TinyMCE, as choices for users. That was the first time I knew FCKeditor and it gave me a good impression.
Generally speaking, the two take up most of the market. But after using them for a while, I realized some issues with them I can’t tolerate. Although they did great contribution to the Internet, they’re just not for me.
They Produce Uncontrollable Codes
Firstly I say that such editors are not for Internet novices. Why? Just open an image insertion dialog box in FCKeditor to see the options (see the FCKeditor demo). Will my mother understand what is “alternative text”? Or what is HSpace/VSpace? No. Not to say options in the “Advanced” tab. She just wants to insert an image! What the hell are these new concepts?
As a developer, I always want to be clear of what HTML code is underlying the rendered output. Both of the two editors can’t produce clean code for me. There are cases when we want to edit the source code by hand, though this doesn’t happen quite often. What do you think when you see the code in a mess but not like what you expected?
So I quickly discarded them and enjoyed the quick tag editor in WordPress. I really like it. It just converts a single line break into a “<br />” and a series of line breaks into a paragraph. Other characters remain the same.
They’re Much More than too Heavy
What do you use an Rich Text Editor for? Will you use it to create a complex website? Of course not. We mostly write simply styled articles, and they can be done easily (of course not easy for my mother) with a plain text editor.
I myself lived a good life with the quick tag editor. But at last I couldn’t get by the doom when our users needed a rich editor. So I picked up FCKeditor.
The size and speed of the editors are intolerable for doing such simple works, especially when you want to make a rich text box on the fly which needs quick response to make the user experience smooth. I heard enough complaints about the speed. No one would like to open Microsoft Word frequently, right?
Compatibility Problems
Recently FCKeditor released the 2.5 version and added Safari and Opera to their compatibility list. TinyMCE is beta testing its 3.0 version and it support all the main browsers.
However there are other compatibility related problems. I saw on several machines that the modal dialogs are squeezed to a very slim window, about 30 pixels wide, without scroll bars, making it completely unusable. Sure it may be problems of browsers, but there will be no problems if they use JavaScript and XHTML to fake a dialog. TinyMCE now uses such technique a lot, but there are still traditional modal dialogs.
They’re both too heavy to catch up the pace of technology innovations. Especially FCKeditor.
NicEdit, a New Hope?
I’ve been searching for an alternative to FCKeditor for weeks, since our users complained a lot about the text editor. I discovered NicEdit all of a sudden.
It is light weight – only 30K of a single JavaScript file. And it never uses popup dialogs except alerts. The auto-fit-height feature is really cool. An ideal solution for web sites. So I’m seriously considering switching to it, and my colleagues are also looking forward to it.
I’m pretty satisfied with the current feature set of NicEdit, But the author is considering some proposed features for the next version. This makes me wonder how FCKeditor/TinyMCE were like in the beginning. Were they as simple and light weight as today’s NicEdit? Maybe it’s the never ending feature requests which created today’s bit monsters. I really hope NicEdit will keep the feature set small and make them robust. There are still problems. For example, when the editor is not active, clicking the “insert image” button will generate a JavaScript error.