Attention: We are retiring the ASP.NET Community Blogs. Learn more >

Simple rich text conquered

I have a confession to make... I've barely touched POP Forums v8 in a year. Frankly, I'm glad I didn't get too involved because so much changed in .NET v2 beta 2. Anyway, one of the things I struggled with was making a very simple rich text editor that worked in Firefox and IE. I've had one for years that worked in IE, but I haven't even used IE myself in 18 months. Oddly enough, and as best I can tell, my forum was the first anywhere to include rich text editing.

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.

2 Comments

  • Hey Jeff, I'd rather v. 8 err on the side of simplicity. That's what i grew to love about PF 7.5. I actually am happy even when forums don't have rich text. I don't like the way HTML text double spaces lines. I prefer to post in basic text but have some bold/italic options like snitz. Color text is great but it's not a deal breaker. Comes in handy for code notation. I think that's the only time I ever use it.

  • I agree - simple wins!



    Hopefully, you were able to use WebResources if you're using whidbey for streaming out the images...

Comments have been disabled for this content.