[whatwg] Editor types [Was: Pressing Enter in contenteditable: <p> or <br> or <div>?]

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 1:40 AM, Markus Ernst <derernst at gmx.ch> wrote:
>
> Re-reading the discussions I get the impression that we have actually two
> different basic concepts of online rich-text editors:
>
> 1. A WYSIWYG editor. It offers all kinds of formatting options, allowing
> users to apply their preferred fonts, colors, sizes, table column widths and
> whatever. In this case I want to generate a code that preserves the visuals
> in all kinds of situations. In this case, it may be a good idea to generate
> style attributes whereever possible. It might even be a good idea to use
> <div>s for paragraph separation, I don't know.
>
> 2. An HTML editor. Authors possibly want to restrict the formatting
> options. The code generated should be as basic HTML as possible, so the
> output adapts to the styles of the target page - even if they are changed
> due to a redesign. In this case I want to avoid style attributes whereever
> possible, and I definitely want to generate <p>s and <br>s. I might even
> want to make a distinction between <i> and <em>. I assume this is what
> Ryosuke (and myself) talk about.
>
> With this distinction in mind, I think some of Aryeh's questions on what
> markup we want to generate have two different answers by nature. I read
> about the styleWithCSS option erlier in this list. Maybe it would be helpful
> to have a more generic option to set the editor into a WYSIWYG or HTML
> state. This would of course cause more speccing and implementation work, but
> could allow to define two different and consistent sets of standard
> behaviors.


This is an excellent point but I feel that this is something editor
frameworks such as TinyMCE and CKEditor should provide.  I'd rather provide
APIs that let framework easily implement those two modes than adding
mediocre support in browser.  e.g. being to intercept editing commands such
as InsertParagraph or Italic and insert an element of choice.

- Ryosuke