My Rails app needs a decent rich text editor, but nothing out there
really seems to do what I want. Looking at the code for these editors,
they all seem horrendously browser specific, full of workarounds and
multiple methods of doing things.
So, I’ve written a proof-of-concept rich text editor, using Prototype,
which works through DOM manipulation.
Structured Editing: Cross-browser javascript text editor
This shows it’s possible to do structured and styled text editing
without resorting to those nasty browser specific things like
contentEditable and designMode. Not using the browser’s editing removes
the need to do the markup cleaning and continually adjusting the code to
keep up with the browsers.
This approach also allows a lot more control in what is edited, and
surprisingly, the code seems about the same complexity as other editors.
I was very surprised to find that it works in just about any recent
browser, only needing a few ‘unnecessary’ lines of code to work around
Safari bugs.
Is anyone interested in helping me to finish this? I haven’t done much
with javascript before, so I may not have done things quite properly and
could do with the help of a javascript guru. But please don’t let that
put you off looking at the code!
Ben