> Clients always want wysiwyg editors and you know that's bad for them
Not a fan of wysiwyg, but a bit arrogant no?
Not a fan of wysiwyg, but a bit arrogant 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"><p><p><p>but what you <em><strong></strong><em>get is very ugly</p></p></p><br><br></w:ptab>
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).
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.
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 = <br>, double newline = new <p> tag. Regarding <p> tags there is exactly two states: Having one open and having none open.
Does it really have to be that hard?
Thinking about it, the correct thing to do is to use <p> 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).
I'm using this for import/export description fields... Then I replace h1/h2 with h3. It works pretty well.
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.