On WebKit text editors

[Jorge Villaseñor]

On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 7:42 PM, Elliott Sales de Andrade
<qulogic at pidgin.im>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> In case you were not aware, one of the biggest changes for 3.0.0 is
> the switch to WebKit.
>
<snip>

>
> To that end, I wonder what everyone would think about just using some
> existing HTML/JS editor component for our input entry? The people who
> have created them have likely faced every possible problem or quirk in
> the browser already. It provides some forwards compatibility with
> WebKit2, where the browser process is separate and we'd basically have
> to convert to JS anyway. The fact that they can be themed might be of
> interest to some people as well.
>

I think it is a great idea to use an existing editor.


> I think two of the better choices are TinyMCE or CKEditor. They've
> both got compatible licenses, limited (or no) dependencies, themes,
> smileys, plugins, etc. that would be useful for us. There may be
> others; I did not look extensively.
>
> Possible drawbacks:
> - Not our code, but we'll need JS anyway and we don't seem to be
> experts so far (that I can tell).
> - Somewhat bloated since they (generally) support all browsers and we
> only care about WebKit.
> - We'd probably need to write something to do WBFO, but they've both
> got plugin systems that could do it.
> - Dialogs might be tricky. The "Insert Link" or "Insert Smiley"
> buttons normally create a popup, which would be a problem on a
> two-line high entry. We might have to do some interface with our code
> to get that into native windows or something.
>
> Anyway, what do you think of this idea? Our editor right now is good
> enough for relatively simple things, but it really doesn't support
> everything we had. And it's really really fragile, getting stuck in
> infinite loops if you change things too much.
>
>
My only concern is if we can configure them to clean format
programatically, hide the format bar, adding buttons to the formatting bar
 as we have now (like the smiley and attention one). Maybe all this can be
done through the plugin interfaces.

-- 
Masca

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
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A: Top-posting.
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