I swear, some days you just want to reach into the screen and strangle the blogger on the other end. Jeff Atwood complains that his users commonly fail to read all the helpful hints on how to use their overly complicated, what you see isn’t what you get editor on Stack Overflow:

The ask question page is already dangerously close to cluttered with helpful tips, but apparently these helpful buttons, links, and text are all but invisible to a large segment of the user population. Sure, you could argue that Super User tends to attract less sophisticated users, but I see the exact same problem with programmers on Stack Overflow. As new users, a significant percentage of them can't figure out how to format code, even though there's not only a toolbar button that does it for you, but help text on the right explicitly describing how to do it manually. (Just indent 4 spaces. Spoiler alert!)

So essentially, users don’t find the editor intuitive and the solution they’ve gone with up until now is to add more and more help text to try and teach the user how to use the unintuitive editor. It’s not working. The obvious solution is to escalate the arms race:

More and more, I'm thinking we need to put the formatting help — for new users only — directly in their line of sight. That is, pre-populate the question entry area with some example formatting that is typical of the average question. Nothing complicated. But at least then it'd be in the one — and apparently the only one — place myopic users are willing to look. Right in front of their freakin' faces.

Thankfully the comments are full of people suggesting the right answer – fix the editor so you don’t need instructions to use it. You can always provide a source view for geeks who like to type in markup, but make the default something that just works.

If the mark of a poor tradesman is that they always blames their tools, the mark of a bad UI designer is that they always blame the users. It’s not them, it’s you.

As promised, a few days ago IBM shipped the OEM edition of EditLive! It’s available to all existing WCM clients on Portal 6.1 or later from passport advantage.

Mostly for my own benefit of having an easier place to find this, it’s version 6.5.3.55 of EditLive! which is a little older than I was expecting, but still quite recent. Enterprise Edition clients (direct from Ephox) have access to the 6.6.2.6 release from early March, which includes a bunch of new features like the inline table toolbars, but my understanding is that IBM will be providing updates fairly regularly which is nice.

Congratulations to all involved in making this happen, both from Ephox and IBM. It’s been an incredibly fast turn around from the signing of the deal to a shipping product.

UPDATE: Actually, it’s more recent than that even. The download is mislabelled as 6.5.3.55 but it actually contains version 6.6.2.6 of EditLive! – the latest official release.

Sam Ruby notes that the White House feed contains a fair bit of debris:

Also noted in the process: the feed itself contains a fair amount of debris.  A sytle attribute?  A meta tag?  o:p is common in content carelessly copy/pasted from Microsoft Word.

Ah the good old o:p crud from Word.  I know a fantastic html editor they could use that would fix that up for them. Clean copy and paste from Word is probably the most popular feature in EditLive!

One of the great challenges of writing an HTML editor is discovering and smoothing over all the weird complexities in HTML. There are just some areas of HTML (and CSS) that are brain-dead stupid and you have to wonder how on earth it ever came to be like that. I suspect most of those brain-dead areas are involved with alignment or tables. This of course means that aligning tables is particularly stupid.

Let’s start with just HTML. There’s an align attribute in HTML which seems nice and straight forward <p align=”right”> will align the the paragraph content to the right. <p align=”center”> will center the paragraph content. Unfortunately this doesn’t hold true for tables.  <table align=”left”> will float the table itself left, allowing the text to wrap around the table. <table align=”right”> will do the same on the right, but <table align=”center”> will just center the table itself, without wrapping text around it.

Now add in CSS – which at least by itself is much more sensible.  <table style=”text-align: center”> has no effect on the table itself, but centers all the contents of the cells. <table style=”float: left”> floats left as does float: right. So far so good, but what if we want to center the table itself? That would be <table style=”margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;”>  What the?

I’m sure there are good and logical reasons for all these crazy things, but anyone who’s tried to provide an align attribute in a table dialog that’s compliant with both old and new browsers and is intuitive for users has quite significant bald patches because of this.

Pangle on Twitter:

Ephox EditLive Editor will change the world. Well maybe not the world, but it will make WCM content easier to format.

I couldn’t agree more. This is of course in response to the news coming out of Lotusphere that IBM has licensed EditLive! as a standard part of their WCM offering. Ephox has been an IBM business partner for quite a few years now and has built up a lot of relationships with their technical and sales teams as well as selling EditLive! as a third party add-on to a lot of WCM clients. It’s very exciting to see this go up a step and have EditLive! as a standard part of the offering. I don’t have an exact ship date for the OEM version yet, but my understanding is that it will come as an update to Portal 6.1.

So to all the new Ephox clients who are being introduced to EditLive! as part of this agreement – welcome. I really look forward to working with IBM to get you up and running with EditLive! and seeing what it can do to improve you WCM authoring environments and resulting content. I’ve spent the last week putting together a white paper to share the experience we’ve had upgrading WCM deployments to EditLive! and a bunch of best practices for configuring EditLive! to get the most out of it.

To all our existing clients, thanks for all your support so far and  we look forward to continuing to work with you. The OEM agreement includes just the base edition of EditLive! so we’ll continue to ship the Enterprise Edition as an add-on, with some big improvements planned for both it and the base edition.  This isn’t an official source of Ephox news and I want to avoid getting any details wrong so I’ll refrain from giving details, but rest assured that everyone at Ephox is committed to making sure that we keep making all our clients happy – especially those who have supported us in the past.  If you have questions, we’ve got a page giving some information on the OEM agreement and please do contact us if you have any further questions or concerns. The white paper is probably useful for you as well.

To everyone within Ephox, congratulations on making such a fantastic editor, from engineering and product management making sure the product is great, to sales and marketing getting the word out and making enough sales to keep us in business and the admin team for letting everyone else focus on their jobs.

Now let’s get back to work and keep changing the world.