At 14:12 24/12/2003 +0100, Tino Wildenhain wrote:
Most of the time its not appropriate to have a wysiwyg-editor, since you cant be sure of the woug (what other users get)
Indeed, but through a good editing solution (either rich text TTW or dedicated app), you can control what formation options people have (eg. can only use H1/H2/H3, bold, size 1/2/3, etc.), and since they're only sending their bits of contents, layout is enforced through CSS. And finally, I was thinking of passing the contents through a script to regex out any oddity, to make sure we don't keep any personal formatting that would break the site's graphical homogeneity.
Wikies are a good example for this.
But users want Word, not structured text in ASCII :-)
Of what use is a wysiwyg solution if the targeted user has absolute no clue about (s)he is doing?
But then, they don't need to know more than what they already know, ie. how to type rich text in a Word or Outlook. It's our job as sys admins to provide them with tools that make it possible to everyone in a community (eg. company) to contribute to a web site, not just the technical savy that we are :-)
gasp... 20 pages of text. Show me more then 10 people which are willing to read 20 pages of text in one page.
Maybe an exageration but then, take a look at the average software spec or university article...
So its all a matter of analyzing the process and the real needs rather then the "I think I would like to have for some reason I dont know". :-)
But precisely, I got it all analyzed: Currently, my site is all static (save the front page whose list of articles is generated dynamically through a few lines of PHP), each article is written in Namo's excellent WebEditor (fast, generates clean HTML), which are then uploaded by FTP. My friend's site is even worse, as explained (no PHP, stand-alone articles written in Word.) I think Fogcreek had it right with CityDesk, but I'd rather use an open-source solution. Besides, I don't feel to confident trusting my whole site to a Jet database :-) Cheers Fred.