Allowing users to destroy their content in hideous ways
I'm only young but I still have vivid memories of the early personal websites - those lovely Geocities pages with broken HTML, black & lime green backgrounds, bright red text and liberal use of <blink> tags. These were presumably these precursors to blogs.
One of the best things about blogs is that they generally don't allow users to do such awful things with the formatting of their sites. Typically users choose from a few tasteful themes and can then apply basic bold, italitcs and hyperlinks to their content. When you read them in an RSS Aggregator you are even further away from the formatting.
MSN Spaces started out this way - an extremely limited WYSIWYG editor. I was most disappointed a few months ago when I saw that they had added font control and edit-HTML mode. It looks like we are heading back to the Geocities days. Ugghhh.
I regularly have similar conversations with the corporate clients we build websites for. As a design focused company our web designers put a great deal of work into designing beautiful and consistent styles and layouts for a site. But when it comes to the content-management system for the website, the client typically wants to be able to apply a vast range of formatting and also edit the HTML themselves.
Combine this desire with the gross inadequacies of Internet Explorer's WYSIWYG capabilities and you get a real mess. The key to an attractive website is consistency. The only way we could get this was to seriously lock down FreeTextBox:
- Removing all FTB Toolbar items except for bold, italic, underline, subscript, superscript, UL, OL, WordClean and the hyperlink buttons
- Setting the PasteMode property to Text so that when pasting formatted text we don't end up making mess (some clever users seem to have figured out how to get around this)
- Writing some lengthy methods for processing the outputted HTML on postback before saving it to the database
- Disabling the HTML mode option to prevent broken websites etc