Volition

An insightful blog entry about why the current generation of in-browser content editors suck.

One big problem is that they invariably litter the generated markup with stylistic droppings, which is what all the cool kids are trying to avoid right now. Yes, that's right, those bold and italics buttons suck.

One "correct" way to avoid this would be to provide the user with a combo-box full of inline-types, similar to the combo-box full of block types (P, H1, BLOCKQUOTE, etc) that Midas (and other editors) has now. This would replace the bold, italic, color seleector and other naughty stylistc UI controls.

When selecting an inline style from the list, the selected text would be enclosed with an appropriate HTML element, or if none are appropriate, then it would be enclosed by a SPAN with a class unique to that type. This then gets styled using CSS.

For example, you may have the following inline styles defined: Emphasis, Strong, Silly and Red. Selecting "Strong" might wrap text in STRONG tags, and selecting "Silly" might wrap the text in a SPAN with a class of "silly".

This list of inline styles would need to be customisable by administrators, and some mechanism for including the appropriate CSS would also need to be provided, but I think this approach gives both content authors some flexibility and content publishers some sane markup. Which is good.