Some Composite hurdles
Posted on March 26, 2003 @ 18:02 in Software
A while ago there was some talk on the MovableType forums about getting a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor working with MovableType. I guess I don't have to tell any blogger what kind of bliss a nice in-browser textarea editor would be, as opposed to typing into an always too small textbox, navigating around the inevitable HTML tags. The editor under discussion was htmlArea. I gave the program a try and it works, but as Richard notes as well, it leaves you stranded with some seriously non-standards compliant code. For further discussion of htmlArea see John's Jottings and there is an extensive list of "through-the-web" rich text editors here.
When Mozilla 1.3 was released, it promised new opportunities for rich text editing and Composite appears the most suitable candidate for taking advantage of the new Mozilla functionality. I couldn't get get it to work though, but there have been some developments.
First of all, the latest Composite (0.0.5) doesn't work with Mozilla 1.3 (oh irony), so I went and reinstalled Mozilla 1.2.1. Then, if you go to the Composite installation page, you will find that the download link points to the downloads.us-east2.mozdev.org server, but that's incorrect. The right address to get your Composite xpi is downloads.us-east3.mozdev.org/composite/. Next, if you want to install xpi files, you have to go into the Mozilla Preferences > Advanced > Software Installation and Enable Software Installation. If you were being paranoid about security, like me, and turned that off, you can try as you might, but Mozilla will keep completely schtumm, whatever you do with that xpi file.
So, finally I had Composite 0.0.5 installed on Mozilla 1.2.1 and it finally opened up the editing window when pressing ctrl+e in the textarea, but for the most part the program didn't work. Nothing happened when switching between the View and Source views, none of the menus or buttons seemed to work. After I'd almost given up, I spotted a link to a Composite version hacked to work with Mozilla 1.3. This hack works! Well, mostly. Don't use the ctrl+e shortcut to open the editor, because it will eat the first character in the textarea, but double click in the textarea to open the editor.
I played around with it for a while and here's a list of what I think it should do before I can really use it on an everyday basis (with MovableType):
• XHTML rather than HTML compliant tags out of the box
• it should respect CR/LF. Right now, even if I'm not using paragraph formatting, it still inserts BR tags when I hit the Enter key. It should only apply paragraph and break tags when I tell it to. I could of course set MovableType to not Convert Line Breaks, but Composite insists on inserting a BR tag as the very last thing of every paragraph even when using paragraph formatting, so that's out for the moment.
• user definable markup. I want to be able to define how Composite handles the tags it inserts, so I can control how for instance fonts and images are handled by adding relevant CSS, or basically include any markup (like MTTextile formatting if I'd wanted to) instead of (X)HTML.
• more control/keyboard shortcuts for character entities.
• last wish: user configurable toolbar :-)
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