Only a geek can fall in love with an online rich text editor and I’m smitten. For years I’ve been in toxic relationships with “other” rich text editors and recently I’ve seen the light. She is so graceful, caring and semantic, but alas, it is not of the faith….shhh…a java applet…Ephox EditLive be her name…but don’t tell Bill.
It all started a few years back when consultants started speaking of her prowess and I dared navigate to the site to partake of her offerings. I was immediately hooked and returned with salespeople and prospective customers on numerous occasions to catch a glimpse of her high fidelity cut/paste which left bullets intact. Delighted by her functionality we proposed and she accepted, it was an OEM made in heaven.
Ok, I could go on but you’re probably puking right now so I’ll drop the narrative and get down to business.
Similar to many web professionals and most likely people reading this blog we’ve all had to put up with sub-par rich text editors or wysiwyg editors as they’ve become known. These are the tools that we’re told will make web publishing a breeze. Just like using Microsoft Word…uh…right…um….wrong!
Scratch the surface of most leading editors and you’ll find that a bullet <li> pasted from a word processor becomes a <p style=”margin-left: 20px” class=”bullet1”> etc… I kid you not; and how about when a simple paragraph becomes enmeshed inside an <h1> and despite repeated attempts you’re forced to drop into HTML to separate them. The reality is that despite all the awesome functionality the leading Web Content Management Systems provide, it is the publishers, the actual users whom spend 90% of their time writing, editing and publishing content which waste countless hours mucking around with editors and are driven to drink by WYSIWYG inconsistency and awkwardness. I won’t even begin to mention the poor web developers that are tasked with supporting them.
Now here’s the really good news….we’re putting the finishing touches on our integration with EditLive in the Elcom CMS and it will be available as a module in version 7.3, due for release in 3 weeks. In fact I’ve just completed a full test cycle and have come away truly impressed with its functionality and specifically the way it cleans and presents semantic HTML code even with cut/pastes from external sources, image cropping, track changes, commenting and accessibility checking as you type. Even advanced table management (for data of course) handling splits, resizes, merged cells, defining header rows vs data rows and table summaries for accessibility, and it never skips a beat while doing all this magic.
…but I know what you’re thinking……it’s a Java app and Elcom is Microsoft shop (heavens forbid). Well the .NET wrapper made integration really straightforward and whatsmore this cool kid has an outstanding javascript based fallback editor that automagically loads for clients that don’t support the java runtime.
So let me just say on my personal, unsponsored and somewhat passionate blog, that the EditLive rich text editor from Ephox is a godsend. As a further bonus it makes me very proud that it was built right here in Australia! So here’s to less grey hair and more accuracy when editing or pasting your web content.
Do you use EditLive? Got a fav editor? I’d love to hear about it, leave a comment…
