Comments on: Browser Based WYSIWYG Editors

By: Symphonious » Importance Of A Good Authoring Environment

Symphonious » Importance Of A Good Authoring Environment — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 03:09:53 +0000

[...] Other than that, it's a pretty good list of basic requirements for a WYSIWYG editor. I've commented before on some key things to look at when evaluating WYSIWYG editors that comes at it from a slightly more technical side. Combine the two and you have a good system out of the box that can be customized and extended to provide the best possible editing experience for users. [...]

By: Adrian Sutton

Adrian Sutton — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 20:45:05 +0000

Greg,
See my reply over on http://www.symphonious.net/2006/06/07/pasting-images-into-editlive-for-java/#comments

Adrian.

By: Greg

Greg — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 18:53:49 +0000

Hey, I’m starting a (very ambitious) e-learning website and I’ll need a browser-based editor. I came across EditLive and it seems a great fit in many ways. (Especially in that it allows users to paste from the clipboard to your app.)

I’ve got three questions:
1) Which Java version is this? The latest Java doesn’t have a great market penetration, and I’m going to need something that works for at least 90% of the users. I don’t want to force them to download huge runtimes just to edit documents online.

2) What does the editor output? XML? If people don’t have Java, I would like them to at least be able to run a tool that DISPLAYS the contents of the document, including math formulas. Do you know of any tool that can render your app’s output (at least semi-decently)?

(If not, we might just have to write our own AJAX-based equation editor and compete with yas, hehehe.)

3) What is the SUPPORT like at your company? Suppose we purchased a professional license. When our clients start complaining that the editor on our website has a bug, what are our options?

Sincerely,
Greg

By: Symphonious » Pasting Images Into EditLive! for Java

Symphonious » Pasting Images Into EditLive! for Java — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 23:51:53 +0000

[...] I got some nice feedback over night on an old post about WYSIWYG editors: [...]

By: Pedja

Pedja — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 13:49:30 +0000

You are the greatest.

You are the only web rich text control where I can simply paste image from clipboard.

Congratulations!

By: Bertrand Delacr�taz

Bertrand Delacr�taz — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks for your advice! This is very useful (although it means yet more choices ;-)

By: Steven Noels

Steven Noels — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks here as well, but your WebStart demo bombs out in search for a DOM implementation using Safari & Mac OS X:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/w3c/dom/Text
at org.a.a.ah.(Unknown Source)
at org.a.a.f.(Unknown Source)
at org.a.a.n.do(Unknown Source)
at org.a.a.n.(Unknown Source)
at com.ephox.editlive.java2.c.a.(Unknown Source)
at com.ephox.editlive.java2.c.b.(Unknown Source)
at com.ephox.editlive.common.EditorCommandHandler.do(Unknown Source)
at com.ephox.editlive.common.EditorCommandHandler.if(Unknown Source)
at com.ephox.editlive.ELJBean.g(Unknown Source)
at com.ephox.editlive.ELJBean.(Unknown Source)
at WebStartDemo.(WebStartDemo.java:70)
at WebStartDemo.main(WebStartDemo.java:37)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Native Method)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.executeApplication(Launcher.java:844)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.executeMainClass(Launcher.java:804)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.continueLaunch(Launcher.java:682)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.handleApplicationDesc(Launcher.java:397)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.handleLaunchFile(Launcher.java:199)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.run(Launcher.java:167)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:491)

(oh: obfuscating Java binaries code is soo lame ;-)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

“We’re the top of the line in browser based editors and there’s really only a couple of other companies that can compare with our product.”

Are you sure? Of course, you say that, because your are one of the developers…

I think the realobjects editor is very superior to your product. With editlive, it’s easy to produce crappy xhtml, the xhtml code and “custom tag” feature of editlive is worth a loud laugh. realobjects does this much better. with their new version, you will never be able to compete, since you are basing on the crappy swing html editor stuff…

but… nice try :o)

By: Adrian Sutton

Adrian Sutton — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Couple of responses (greatly delayed, sorry about that):

Stephan, the WebStart demo is fixed, we needed to apply a work around for a bug in Mac OS X’s required JRE detection. Also we obfuscate the Java code as it reduces the size of the jar file significantly (package names change from com.ephox.editlive.java2.editor.images.InsertServerImageDialog to com.ephox.editlive.a.a.b.a which adds up to a pretty dramatic space saving).

Anonymous, perhaps you’d like to try the latest version of our product and the much improved custom tag support. You can now mark tags as block, inline or empty and provide your own custom view for them using the standard javax.swing.text.View class or just supply a label and icon using custom CSS attributes. With this in place you can guarantee that the resulting XHTML is at minimum well-formed. I should also note that the custom tag support in EditLive! for Java even without these new features is on par with that of FrontPage, with these new features we now have the most flexible custom tag handling I’ve seen in any editor to date.

Of course, if you really wanted validity, you might want to consider using EditLive! for XML which performs on the fly validation and has a whole swag of features designed for making sure that the resulting XML is valid.

As for the use of the “crappy swing html editor stuff”, while we’re based on that, there’s very little of it left in our product as we’ve been gradually replacing and improving sections to provide better and more reliable functionality.

Finally, regarding: “you will never be able to compete”, I should point out that Ephox is not only competing, but holds significantly more market share than RealObjects in the browser-based editor market. Which editor is better depends on what your specific needs are and will depend to some degree on personal preference, whether or not Ephox can compete with RealObjects is a definite non-argument – Ephox has been competing and winning for some time now. Ephox is the biggest supplier of cross-platform browser based editors in the world, bar none. On the windows only side I believe Ektron still has a larger market share but they have no cross-platform option at all.

I’d be happy to forward on white papers comparing EditLive! for Java with RealObject’s editor as well as a range of other popular options, or better yet drop me an email with the description of what you want from an editor and I’ll tell you how to go about it with EditLive!