wymeditor

I’ve been looking for a great javascript/css editor for a long time. I have tried out several of them, but I was turned off by how busy and complicated they seemed. Too many icons, or not css-centric. A site with a clean CSS design can get easily bungled by badly formated content.

I was fortunate to meet Peter Krantz at Railsconf 2006. Peter runs the Standards-Schmandards website, which I have been following for years. He recently posted about WYSiwym, a visual editor built in javascript that uses pure css to power a creative approach to the problem of web-based rich text editing. Take a minute to check out the demo.

I believe this project has a bright future. Web-based rich text editing should respect the CSS rules put in place by the site’s designers. Less is more when it comes to formatting, and the “block-based” approach to formatting makes a lot of sense for most rich text web applications. I definitely plan to try this out on my next CMS project!