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).