Rick Text Editing: Advanced options for Non-Technical Clients

Question

We've for years been struggling on what Rich Text Editor to use for our clients. The large share of our client request concern issues with the editor, and we have summarized the causes to be 90% of the time a combination of the following:

• Client does not understand anything of HTML and can only use what the editor provides.
• Client wants to do "advanced stuff" like specifically formatted footers under photos (we create classes for these kinds of requests), combined with floating boxes and special fonts.
• Client copies stuff from other places - especially Word.
• Images go into the article as well.

From a client-perspective, these are not overly crazy things, and I want to be able to actually support this. However, after so many years and trying several editors (mainly CKEditor and TinyMCE) we always end up with continuous requests because things go wrong. We generally fix it manually or hack up things in the editor, but I am really interested if this is normal. Are there Rich Text Editors that can do the above easily and without causing much trouble? Do your clients also have problems with these things?

Answer 1

Rich text editing on the web is a complex problem. Effectively, vendors that sell products like ckeditor and tinyMCE are restricted by what the browsers provide in terms of a rich text editing engine.

Each editor is merely an iframed document with contentEditable set to true. This exposes the underlying RTE engine of the browser, including all the quirks and implementation specifics of that browser.

Bottom line is, you are never going to achieve a word like experience in the browser with the current state of browsers. Period. Your clients will always have an unrealistic expectation of rich text editing on the web.

Our job is to mitigate the problems through managing expectations. They need to know that this is the web, not Word. They need to know that most things will work OK, and some will work poorly. They also need to know that things are never going to be consistent across all browsers.