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My primary concerns are that aspects such as nesting order and alt="" are preserved (one tool I tried removed alt="" thinking it was redundant:o), but I would also rather that indenting, as well as the inclusion or exclusion of line breaks and spaces in the source are preserved (due to Nav4 CSS bugs).
Are there still niggles, or is it safe to let people open up documents in modern WYSIWYGs, change the text (including alt text) and save without messing up anything?
The other options are text editing (requiring someone who can read HTML to a minor extent) or just parsing the existing documents into form elements, but that would take a little time to set up.
Maybe one of those coloured syntax highlighting editors would be the easiest compromise.
But, as your not so keen on that callum, why not just do something like this:
<!-- You can edit between this line -->
<p>text in here</p>
<!-- and this one. Please don't touch anything else you muppet. -->
Nick
However, once I get very heavily into CSS, I noticed that wholesale cutting and pasting of text blocks in the WYSIWYG window often messed up the CSS divs, so it depends on how the page is set up. I've seen some truly amazing auto-generated nested divs that cropped up when I wasn't paying attention.
If you kept the "to be edited" text within a single-cell table, or some other code-buffer you'd probably be OK. Then again, I like the muppet idea. ;)
Ive had to change editors because they wouldnt follow my rules. Luckileeee in FP now it can have all that stuff turned off so I use it like a text editor that just has the FP extension stuff built in ;) heheh some would say that defeats the purpose of a visual editor though.
It's all valid, so the idea of an SGML parse tree in a form via CGI seems to make sense, with all inline elements as INPUT boxes and all block level elements as TEXTAREA boxes. I haven't considered how to approach nesting, though. (eg. SPAN inside A inside P inside LI inside UL inside TD inside...).
I don't recall ever coming across a non-WYSIWYG HTML editor that hides all the HTML but allows content to be edited. Anyone?
Thanks mivox, I'll look into GoLive as well.
can't say i have seen a non-wysiwyg editor doing that either.
I have not as yet come accross a wysiwyg that, when you start doing any sort of formatting, does not add its own quirky mix of unnecessary html in one way or another.
I'm thinking about this for someone with no knowledge at all who wants to do self-updates on a monthly specials page.
It seems the safest way is to set it up so that the changeable section will use SSI. That way all else would stay intact, and if anything got messed up it would just be that one part of the page, which would be easier to fix than if it were the whole thing.
