I’ve previously mentioned my plans on redoing my blog. Well, I’ve settled down on some design issues already (posts will be stored as mini Atom feeds, which makes the generation of Atom feeds for the blog and categories trivial, and gives me maximum flexibility. I already have a working converter for my existing blog to Atom posts.)

Generating static HTML pages from that will be easily possible using an XSTL transformation (for example), and I got the feedback that I could just use Google AppEngine for blog comments, so my actual blog could remain static-only (and thus much more secure and reliable). Any attack/spammer/bot can then only kill the comment functionality, not my own site.

Which brings me to another design consideration: the editing widget. Either for the blog comment application, for writing my own blog entries (via a https protected script or whatever) or maybe for a small CMS I’ve been thinking about

  • having a reliable HTML in-browser editing widget is something I could use every now and then (well, I’m not doing much Web stuff anymore these days).

Geniisoft has a good overview over in-browser (aka: Through The Web, TTW) editors. The top candidates seem to be:

I’ve heard before of FCKeditor and TinyMCE; I think I’ve been on the Xinha page before, too. However, comments on them have not always been good.

To some extend they all seem to have (to some extend) feature creep which usually is a bad sign - most often this means that there are security issues in one or another module or plugin.

TinyMCE for example has been described as “a bit of a pain” and “a tad clumsy” on the GSoC mailing list. I have had less fights with it than with the Debian Wikis (MoinMoin) markup language though.

I’m not looking for anything as big as these - I just need an editor that allows for some basic formatting (bold etc., links) and that produces reasonable XHTML output. I’ll be feeding the output through some custom cleanup script anyway, which will kill disallowed code. So I don’t want any editor which allows the user to create code that will then be killed afterwards.

Any personal experiences with any of these, or an important alternative that I might have missed (no PHP involved, please!) - email me (no comments on blog) at erich AT debian org.

Update: I’ve received a couple of pointers. Please don’t send me links to projects that are not actively maintained anymore - I don’t want to care about having to fix bugs in the editor widget myself.

One link I’ve received twice is actually quite impressive: WYMeditor. It doesn’t try to look like a word processor, but actually is more of a semantic editor. Much more what I’m looking for than any of the others. I’ve also received a link to the Yahoo! UI Library Editor, which is quite clutter-free, but in the default setup at least very text-formatting oriented, not very semantic (that doesn’t mean you couldn’t change it that way, I guess you can). I was also pointed to Dojo, but that framework is totally feature creep (which also explains why it loads so slowly I guess), and the last time I looked at it’s source code, I had some WTF moments - code quality at least outside of core doesn’t seem to be very high (Yes, that code implements the “mod 7” operation using list shifts instead of a simple arithmetic operation).

Looks like I’ll give the first try to WYMeditor. Update #2: the code seems to be rather … complex. I’m looking for something neat and clean; it doesn’t need to bring along yet another XHTML schema and validator … Maybe I should try one of the others first?