Major Issues with TinyMCE and FCKEditors...

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11/30/2009 5:01:03 PM
ddoutel
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Major Issues with TinyMCE and FCKEditors...

I'm finally getting into building content beyond the typical 'lorem ipsum' stuff on a live site, and both of these editors are just killing me. The specific situation I'm dealing with is that I'm building a jQuery Accordion, and if I do anything at all in source mode, neither editor respects the markup. Anything I bold, either by using the toolbar button or Ctrl-B ends up with 20 or 30 <strong></strong> tags around the bolded content. Add to this that neither editor respects a simple </br>. When I update what I've done, I end up with <p>&#160</p> or some such junk.

Bottom line, I'm having a devil of a time getting any serious content built, and unless I'm mistaken, these editors are the only way to do it. Has anyone seen this behavior? Am I doing something wrong or unintended?

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

Duane Doutel

 

12/1/2009 7:56:46 AM
Joe Audette
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Re: Major Issues with TinyMCE and FCKEditors...

Hi Duane,

First, thanks for the generous donation you sent! Very appreciated!

I have encountered issues like this before in the various editors. It doesn't always happen but it seems like if you select something and format it and it was already formatted sometimes it can get very messed up as you describe and the only way to fix it once it gets that way is using the html view and correcting the markup. It's like once that nesting starts it just keeps getting worse. I think it is very difficult to make a perfect web based html editor, there is a lot of complex logic to parsing and validating the markup, it tries to correct things for you but sometimes this just backfires and it creates problems instead.

If we could come up with repeatable steps to produce the problem then we could report it as bug to TinyMCE and/or FCKeditor.

Not sure if that was a typo, but note that </br> is not valid, it should be <br />

Best,

Joe

12/1/2009 8:43:37 AM
ddoutel
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Re: Major Issues with TinyMCE and FCKEditors...

Hi Joe!

You are much more than welcome; it really is my pleasure to support your work. You've most certainly supported mine! :)

Understand about web-based editors, and about the difficulty in parsing; one of the things I've done in a past life was write an HTML parser for a Netscrap form filler; unbelievable the idiotic markup you have to code around, sometimes. Actually, I think I can come up with some steps to reproduce this problem; happened repeatedly; I'll post here sometime today or tomorrow when I come up with the steps.

I Finally gave up and resorted to coding the markup offline and just pasting it in after validating it.

You're right about the </br> not being valid; that was, I believe, one of the things which triggered the problems I was having. I had typo'd it and saved, and when I brought it back up, all hell broke loose.

There are just two things I think would be top of the list useful in either TinyMCE or FCKEditor: have the option to turn off the auto-correct "help", and have it do some basic pretty-layout in source view, rather than a solid, unstructured block. Better to have the errors show up in rendering where you can see the result of your mistake and correct it than to have the editor magnify your mistake 10-fold...

Best to you, my friend!

Duane

 

12/1/2009 9:51:27 AM
Joe Audette
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Re: Major Issues with TinyMCE and FCKEditors...

Hi Duane,

You could use a custom file to override mojoTinyMCE.config and this would allow you to set Cleanup to false which "may" solve this though it is recommended not to disable it in the TinyMCE docs.

Might be worth a try though.

Best,

Joe

12/1/2009 9:59:21 AM
ddoutel
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Re: Major Issues with TinyMCE and FCKEditors...

Hey Joe,

Roger that; I'll give it a shot and let you know! Many thanks!

Best!

Duane

 

12/1/2009 8:04:29 PM
ddoutel
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Re: Major Issues with TinyMCE and FCKEditors...

Hey Joe, I note in looking at the TinyMCE configuration options on their wiki that there are a few options which might be quite useful, such as http://wiki.moxiecode.com/index.php/TinyMCE:Configuration/apply_source_formatting, but I note that this option isn't surfaced in the .config file you use to initialize the editor. It states that this option is enabled by default as of V3, but I think it's clear from using Tiny's source view that it is not. This one also might be a good one to surface in the .config: http://wiki.moxiecode.com/index.php/TinyMCE:Configuration/verify_html. It doesn't state what the default for this one is, but I'd assume it's true.

Maybe you could add another look through the TMCE options to your list of things to do sometime in future?

Thanks Joe!

Duane

 

 

12/2/2009 7:16:47 AM
Joe Audette
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Re: Major Issues with TinyMCE and FCKEditors...

Hi Duane,

Believe it or not that apply_source_formatting is already true by default and that is as formatted as it gets. In my experiments, explicitly adding that setting as true does not change anything and setting it to false makes it worse.

There is no need to surface the verify_html because disabling cleanup will achieve the same thing. verify_html allows you to disable html cleanup separately from url conversion but we don't need it because I had to disable url conversion to prevent TinyMCE from changing correct urls provided by our file and link browser to incorrect urls with ../ kind of syntax.

Best,

Joe

12/2/2009 12:07:31 PM
ddoutel
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Re: Major Issues with TinyMCE and FCKEditors...

Hi Joe!

hahahahha! It could actually get worse than that? That's funny! I set the cleanup to false, and it seems to work, but not as one might expect. I purposely stuck some malformed </br> tags in the markup, saved and reloaded it, and it had actually corrected them to <br />.

I think perhaps the lesson I've learned in all this; don't create any serious markup online; rather, build it offline and paste it in.

Ever try that XStandard editor? I went to their site, but it didnt' seem to say much for itself...

Thanks, Joe; appreciate you're looking at it!

Best to you!

Duane

 

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