Joe On ASP.NET

Why would you want to write your own WYSIWYG editor?

I recently had an email exchange with someone asking me about how to approach writing their own WYSIWYG editor control for web applications.

Perhaps an interesting academic exorcize, or maybe he has some very specific application  but it got me thinking about how many implementations there are out there already !

While searching I found this great list which is lifted entirely from Mike Pope [ Click HERE to Read at Mike's Blog ] - THANKS MIKE !

Rich Editor Controls that you can use with ASP.NET

HTML Editors
As near as I can tell, all of these work in-browser and produce HTML or XHTML.

Word Processing, RTF, PDF, and more
These variously support other formats, notably non-HTML (e.g. RTF) and sometimes PDF. Other/Not Sure
I'm not sure how exactly these fit into the picture; they're listed at least in one location as being ASP.NET editors.
  • Community Editor (BigByte). Desktop editing, it says; possibly not in-page HTML editing? Appears to be free.
  • DevEdit NX (Interspire). Not 100% clear that it supports ASP.NET.
More Information
  • A similar list is available at 123aspx.com.
  • Daniel Walzenbach published a list as well in December 2007. With pictures! :-)
  • Scott Mitchell has an article on using FreeTextBox.
  • "Building a WYSIWYG HTML Editor" A two-part article by Mitchell Harper. I'm pretty certain that this is for Internet Explorer only, tho.
Posted: Jun 18 2008, 11:13 AM by JoeStagner | with 6 comment(s)
Filed under: , ,

Comments

Ian said:

You make a great point about not re-inventing the wheel...especially considering if you write your own you also have to keep it current as new browser versions come out.  For me though every site I've installed a WYSIWYG editor, the site's look has wound up screwed up, either because of copying and pasting from Word or from too many line breaks or whatever.  

# June 18, 2008 11:30 AM

Nish said:

Hey Joe,

Your missed to mention MFC's CHtmlEditView  :-)

# June 18, 2008 11:48 AM

Steve Sheldon said:

The big problem I've had with WYSIWYG editors on the web is parsing the resulting HTML, and only allowing through that which should be displayed.  If someone wanted to build something, a nice library that managed whitelisting the HTML tags that would be greatly appreciated.

# June 18, 2008 1:26 PM

John S. said:

The problem with most of these is:

1. Awful output markup

2. Pricey

3. Bloated

FCKeditor has done a lot of work lately to cut down the bloat, generate better markup and they are the most configurable, so that's what I use. Writing custom dialogs makes it feel much more integrated with my apps then just using the standard set.

# June 18, 2008 2:42 PM

John said:

I'm using the Yahoo Rich Text Editor and it's worth taking a look at.

# June 18, 2008 9:31 PM

Christopher Steen said:

Link Listing - June 24, 2008

# June 25, 2008 8:23 AM
Leave a Comment

(required) 

(required) 

(optional)

(required)