Simple rich text conquered
People ask me, "Jeff, why don't you just use FreeTextBox?" Annoying little bugs aside, the thing has just become too huge and cumbersome. There's a lot of bulk in that control, most of which I don't need.
There's some philosophical debate I've had with, er, myself, about what kind of formatting to include. Most major forum packages now support text sizes and color, but I don't think I will. I'm not sold on size yet, but color for sure. In this day and age where we change the look of a site with a few CSS tweaks, it seems pretty stupid to allow color changes within the text. "Everybody's doing it" isn't a compelling reason for me to do it.
So what I've settled on are the basics that are generally useful... bold, italics, links, lists, code and quotes (using the [quote] tag format). In seven years of running online forums, I've never seen any need for other things that would enhance communication.
In any case, after a great exchange on the official Mozilla forum, I got it straightened out, and I feel like I'm beyond a silly roadblock. The new control I wrote is fast and beautiful. The one thing I still need to figure out is how to embed graphics into the assembly, and the stream those out of the assembly via an HttpHandler. I'm sure a little Googling will get me there, but feel free to drop links in the comments if you see something.