Talk:Online rich-text editor

How Rich Text Editors Function
I would like to see a quick discussion about how most rich text editors actually function. 69.112.97.90 (talk) at 05:39, 3 May 2008


 * No kidding. I spent a while in Firebug tonight just trying to figure out where in the CSS or HTML the blinking cursor was coming from.  Web searches were unusually fruitless, and since this article didn't mention designMode it was pretty useless too.  After more digging can't say I was all that surprised that it was some hidden global non-standard mess of a thing.  :(  Anyway, I only put in the part I was searching for...but there's a lot more (like why iframe is used to make selections get preserved within the rich text editor if you touch another control).  HostileFork (talk) 09:32, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Defining an Online Rich Text Editor
The topic of defining what an editor is can be complicated by the following factors:


 * 1 How is the editor accessed? 1a online, 1b desktop, 1c embedded swing app, 1d other?
 * 2 What content does the editor manipulate? 2a simple content/text (plain text, fonts, heading styles) or 2b rich text (images, tables, bullets, sections etc), 2c an entire web page (including styles, layout, code snippets)?
 * 3 How does the editing interface render content? 3a WYSIWYG experience (for example do the fonts in the editor look the same as the final rendered/printed result, is the layout consistent) or 3b plain text
 * 4 How is the content stored? 4a HTML, 4b .doc, pdf (or other print oriented formats, 4c wiki markup, 4d XML - this question could be rephrased to ask what is the destination medium for the content: web, database, printed document etc.

The existing heading "definition problems" is a first pass at addressing this and needs a lot more work. When describing an editor the case can be made that each of the four factors above should feature in the description of the type of editor: for example online rich content WYSIWYG wiki editor. From the list laid out above one can already generate 96 possible combinations to describe the editor in question. Fortunately, most combinations are not particularly relevant. The case can be made for a master article on the topic of editors which then links to "sub" articles for the most important types of editors. Mgabbiani (talk) 18:21, 3 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Interesting thinking, but looks like a solution in search of a problem! I don't think people landing on this page are doing so because they wonder if running Microsoft Word on a network application server and exporting to HTML would count as running an "online rich-text editor".  :)  The only confusion I think is relevant is that some people do call FCKeditor and the like "HTML editor", which is probably wrong.  Rather than having a long explanation of why it's probably the wrong name, a simple disambiguator at the top points out that a confusion may exist and sends people to a more sensible place ("For applications that are used to create websites, see HTML editor.") HostileFork (talk) 09:32, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

I have to disagree HostileFork, I came to the article precisely to find some clarity on the issues that Mgabbiani identifies, specifically in relation to online vs. offline editors. It seems to me that how the editor is accessed is central, notwithstanding any particular user-perception of this point of access. As I understand it, rich-text refers to text that contains control characters. A rich-text editor can insert these control characters and either display them or not, and in various ways, depending on the users wishes. Before the vanilla-beige world of M$, wordprocessors allowed users to see what was going on under the hood. Geekdom has now ruled that users (sheep?) should be denied access for their own good - and it is only a fortunate byproduct that this is also (?) to the benefit of geekdom and at the expense of users. Be this as it may though, rich-text editors are NOT in fact "online" editors. ALL modern WP programs (besides eg emerald editor) are rich-text editors. Some of these are designed to function only via a third-party browser/human interface, which are generally only designed to access local hard drives in 'particular'' ways. I wonder if there are any "browsers" out there equally capable of displaying and working with remote and local rich-text files. I digress. LookingGlass (talk) 11:12, 12 October 2016 (UTC)

Telerik
Since it is a commercial product its notability getting proved is a bigger deal than the open source examples. Maybe calling out **particular** free ones should be changed too, yet at least those guys have wikipages - if someone puts up a Telerik RT editor wikipage (that lasts!!) that would be a minimum I think for justifying listing alongside perfectly illustrative examples that are free 67.174.203.17 (talk) 17:01, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Lightweight / Heavyweight
I've never see this kind of "classification" for editors and there is no explanation of what they really mean. It looks like these lists have been created for marketing purposes and are misleading. I would simply remove these lists, moving the entries to the proper inline/iframed lists. --83.144.114.110 (talk) 14:54, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Section for or integration of the possibilities and usage of collaborative writing
Aren't Collaborative real-time editors like Etherpad also Online rich-text editors? I think there should be a new section for those and Collaborative writing's usage of such tools in general. Alternatively it could be integrated into the text. --Fixuture (talk) 19:27, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

broken / inaccessible link
points to a resource that is no longer accessible:

(http 403)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Rich-Text_Editing_in_Mozilla

may be a correct replacement


 * ✅ Btw you could have done it yourself, but thanks for reporting anyway

. --Fixuture (talk) 17:57, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

Loss of NPOV
Looking at the Wiki articles on rich-text I see a "non-NPOV" approach being adopted that favours .. established industry forces more than the subject matter itself. Rich-text is clearly defined in the article concerned, however when editors are introduced into the picture things go pear shaped. Editors have been broken down on Wiki into two camps: wordprocessors (the article that rich-text-editors now forwards to) and online-rich-text-editors. The wordprocessor article could failry be characterised as focusing on M$ and hardware. It does not set out to recognize that the WP software may or may not: Depending on the precise definition of rich-text, but according to the Wiki definition, programs such as Enerald Editor are rich-text editors. Emerald Editor (formely Crimson Editor) displays HTML, PHP etc code as colour coded text, so not as plain-text. As Emerald Editor does not compile its rich-text to display, I suppose it is half way between a rich-text and a plain-text edtor. however it would seem theoretically possible for Emerald Editor to be extended to deliver this functionality either directly or through incorporating the functionality of the local machine's browser. The point in all this is that there is a logical gap in Wiki's categorisation of software that edits text. While the articles themselves may have a NPOV their focus provides a distorted "understanding" of the subject. It seems to me that the reality of RT editors can be represented in a 2x2 grid: Online/offline, Local/remote, and that currently only two of the sqaures of this are filled in and these only incompletely. Two things need to be done IMO to adress this: LookingGlass (talk) 12:22, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
 * 1) operate on local or remote files
 * 2) be hardware and/or platform dependent
 * 3) be located in the cloud,
 * 4) generate output for display through the same software that generated it, generic software, or different software e.g a browser.
 * the Wordprocessor article should be de-merged so that it includes for the possibility of online AND offline editors, perhaps also separating hardware and software at this time, and
 * the Online-rich-text editor article should be de-merged so the two resultan articles can include for the possibility of online AND offline rich-text editors.

Some examples?
No sites as examples? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.91.51.235 (talk) 14:20, 3 November 2019 (UTC)

Data format
Readers deserve to see a section on the marked up data format that is saved. For example, does the data typically consist of text with a subset of HTML tags? Does the data typically come with its own CSS block? Or would visual styles committed by the end user be more typically represented by inline style attributes? Or is a non-HTML templating language like RTF ever used? 141.143.193.79 (talk) 13:05, 9 December 2019 (UTC) (Doug Held at Oracle.com, not logged in)