Feed Sign in with OpenID OpenID

Simon Willison’s Weblog

More thoughs on Flash editors

Flash Voodoo’s Battle of the Flash Text Editor Components (via Jeremy Allaire) is interesting—the editors are all good, but they all suffer from the same problem in that the code they generate is pretty horrible (font tags and presentational markup galore). This is a limitation of Flash rather than a problem with the coders—our Flash Editor (currently under development by my colleague Richard) has the same problem, so we are looking in to ways of cleaning up the resulting code and turning it in to XHTML.

In my opinion options to change font colour, size and typeface are a drawback rather than a benefit—most applications for rich text editors will be content management systems that try to create a standard look and feel across a site, rather than letting content editors apply their own styles when they create the content. My ideal editor would be more of a structural XHTML editor than anything else—users would be able to add headers, lists and other structural elements and then apply styles from a logical selection controlled by the CMS. The only question is whether or not Flash MX is a suitable platform for this kind of application (as a complete Flash novice I can only guess at its potential in this regard).

Posted 13th September 2002 at 12:17 am

This is More thoughs on Flash editors by Simon Willison, posted on 13th September 2002.

View blog reactions

Next: Fun with Unicode

Previous: Another excellent blog

8 comments

  1. I'm not sure you have all of the requirements down pat. There is a need as you have said, for a cms based editor that allows for the concept of brand control. However there is also the need at the other end of the spectrum for full editing within simple confines. Ektron have been doing this for some time, but they are activeX based and worse still have started to do things like spelling (using Microsoft office locally). Once you start down this road then I think you start chasing your tail and defeating the object. I would propose that users don't create doc's, save them, edit them, save them, on-line. They willuse an offline tookl for that. So inline editors are much more for one hit create or edits. So editors need to steer a mid line and allow full editing or controlled editing i.e. they need ot be very configurable at load time AND cross browser compatible I have seen users trying to enter non breaking spaces in a mac browser in a cms it's not pretty.

    Simon Frank - 13th September 2002 10:17 - #

  2. That's an interesting perspective. I agree that offline editors are an important part of content creation - no one wants to write a press release or tutorial straight in to a browser. Online editors are more useful for smaller chunks of content (news stories for example) and "edit this page" style functionality. The Flash editor we are working on pulls config information in through XML, which seems to be the best way of sending that kind of structured information to Flash MX clients. I suppose the killer app for a CMS is strong integration with Word. It's a shame Microsoft appear do everything possible to make this difficult to achieve. That said, I still haven't looked at HTML Tidy properly (which has a special "clean up Word HTML" mode) - I'll check it out some time and blog what I find out :)

    Simon Willison - 13th September 2002 12:51 - #

  3. Why not make the Flash editor create an XML document (IIRC Flash can now do this natively) and then use XSLT to convert it to XHTML? Just wish I had the skills to code an application that would do that :-)

    Peter - 13th September 2002 17:09 - #

  4. /me waves his Java around. I don't know why anyone would want to use Flash MX when Java has been around for ages, you can write an almost fully functional text editor that could work as an applet, a local application, or, possibly more importantly in todays Java driven world, a J2EE server based application. I'd have thought this would have been IDEAL for a CMS, you have the same code base for a "on the road" aplication version, a small cut down applet version for a quick paste up/internet cafe task, or a almost fully featured app that sits on your application server. FlashMX, uhh, um, it works on lots of browsers! Ohh dear, I appear to have turned into a Java evangelist.

    Swannie - 13th September 2002 18:46 - #

  5. I guess that using Tidy to clean the generated code is the best solution, although server-side one.

    Michal Jaskolski - 19th June 2003 12:42 - #

  6. "I suppose the killer app for a CMS is strong integration with Word. It's a shame Microsoft appear do everything possible to make this difficult to achieve." I am curious but what are you talking about here? Is this a I-have-no-idea-what-I-am-talking-about-but-I-want- to-accuse-Microsoft thing? Many professional CMS have word integration actually, and Word can both save and read XML now.

    Jin - 26th November 2004 23:48 - #

  7. do any of you reading this know how i can use flash (editing it i mean SWF files) because i am creating a web edit program like dreamweaver

    james - 24th May 2006 09:19 - #

  8. have you seen ajaxwrite.com? Only works in firefox, but it saves your work as a Word document and delivers it to you via http download. I'd like to see a Flash app like this that produces xml.

    Shane Houstein - 7th July 2006 01:35 - #

Comments are closed.

Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2002/09/13/moreThoughsOnFlashEditors

A django site