David Garamond wrote:

> Steve Willer wrote:
>> This looks pretty nice, and I'm glad the project is moving along.
>> 
>> One question, though: Why switch to TinyMCE from HTMLArea? Checking
>> them quickly, I didn't see any big feature differences...
> 
> Also, what about FCKeditor? It seems nice too...

Having used all three....

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HTMLArea2 is much simpler, and if you can live with a basic, kind of ugly
editor, and can live with it munging your use of whitespace and some
general bugginess (doesn't always like HTML comments, for example), it's
okay.
-----
HTMLAres3 has more features but, stock, is still pretty ugly.  It's also
quirky in a different way.  One IE6.x or Firefox, reasonably good handling
of most things, though it still munges whitespace.  It totally screws up
attempts to do things like this, though:

<input type="button" value="Close Window" onclick="window.close()">

It messes up the event handler.

It also starts doing bad things with HTML comments in IE 5.x (honestly, not
sure if it was in 5.5 or 5.0SP2 that it did bad things, but in one of them
it did).
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TinyMCE is very pretty.  It's easy to setup, highly configurable, comes with
a lot of easy to use capability out of the box.  It also does some
questionable HTML cleansing.

style="background-image: url(/images/walls/R1.jpg)"

will become

style="background-image: url{/images/walls/r1.jpg}"

Not good if your file is named R1.jpg.

It also seems to have some issues dealing with HTML that HTMLArea3 and
FCKeditor both cope with fine, but it doesn't munge whitespace like
HTMLArea, and copes with comments and javascript event handlers just fine. 
Overall, I like it a lot better than HTMLArea.

It's compatible with a wide variety of browsers and generally degrades so a
plain textarea well on browsers it won't work on.

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FCKeditor also comes with a large set of features.  It is NOT as easy to
install as TinyMCE, is documented much more poorly and isn't nearly as
configurable in some areas.

It, however, has coped with grace with HTML that gave both TinyMCE and
HTMLArea problems.  The name might be objectionable to some because of the
similarity to another English word, but it, like TinyMCE, has a nice, clean
appearance.

It is NOT based on a textarea, so does not degrade to a plain textarea where
it is not compatible.  It is also the slowest to start up of this bunch of
editors.
-----

All in all, whether to use TinyMCE or FCKeditor is somewhat of a tossup. 
It's going to depend a great deal on other requirements.  If you need it to
work with existing HTML, and simply cope with most anything you throw at
it, FCKeditor seems to be the better choice.  Otherwise, I think the
advantage goes to TinyMCE.


Kirk Haines