Turn any textarea into a wysiwyg html editing form

December 9, 2005 12:53 PM

Turn any textarea into a wysiwyg html editing form - something I and many others wished for the other day.
posted by mathowie (staff) to Feature Requests at 12:53 PM (15 comments total)

ick, it adds paragraph tags to everything. Ignore it.

This is a test of it, yo.

1.  a
2. test

 

posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:56 PM on December 9, 2005

I'd like to clarify my request from the other day. I am not requesting this for my own ease of posting - I am requesting it for everyone's ease of reading. It's just so obnoxious looking when people choose not to take the effort to craft a link and just stick a long address in the text. As for the bold and italic, I don't care. But the non-linked address look ugly, and for a site that is always priding itself on aesthetics, I thought this was an easily-solvable problem.
posted by MrZero at 1:03 PM on December 9, 2005

amen to that.
posted by puke & cry at 1:05 PM on December 9, 2005

What's wrong with 'p' tags? It would be nice if we could turn off metafilter's automatic line-break code.
posted by delmoi at 1:57 PM on December 9, 2005

I don't want paragraph (presentation) tags in the database. I prefer to just let people write as they wish, store that data with invisible markers for carriage returns, and then do the line breaks or paragraphs on the output side of things.

A database with a million records filled with <p>'s is a waste of space.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:03 PM on December 9, 2005

Nearly two million now, even, based on recent comment number on all three sections.
posted by cortex at 2:07 PM on December 9, 2005

mathowie writes "I don't want paragraph (presentation) tags in the database. I prefer to just let people write as they wish, store that data with invisible markers for carriage returns, and then do the line breaks or paragraphs on the output side of things."

Matt, you used to store carriage return - line space pairs after evey 70 or so characters. (Though I see you no longer do.)
posted by orthogonality at 2:44 PM on December 9, 2005

I store carriage returns where people put them. I never forced anything every 70 chars.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 3:25 PM on December 9, 2005

True paragraph tags are part of the spec.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 3:51 PM on December 9, 2005

Matt, you used to store carriage return - line space pairs after evey 70 or so characters.

I store carriage returns where people put them. I never forced anything every 70 chars.

Fight! Fight! Fight!
posted by Falconetti at 4:27 PM on December 9, 2005

He didn't force 'em! They volunteered!
posted by cortex at 4:28 PM on December 9, 2005

Ethereal Bligh, true paragraph tags are part of the spec of OUTPUTTING HTML, not storing random strings in a database. Matt's point is that he runs a content management system, and doesn't feel that mucking up the content itself with the display markup is worth it (a very valid point). Instead, for the most part, the markup gets added as the content gets built into the page... which is how most CMSes work.
posted by delfuego at 5:30 PM on December 9, 2005

mathowie writes "I store carriage returns where people put them. I never forced anything every 70 chars."

Eh, you're right, my mistake. Revirewing some old saved pages and today's, they're the same -- the cr/lfs are after each closing div tag and br tag; so not stored in the database, but pretty-printed on output, with cr/lf space space cr/lf after each comment.
posted by orthogonality at 6:45 PM on December 9, 2005

(I get testy when people lecture me about CMSs.) I disagree with you because we're not talking about XML and everyone pretty much gave up long ago on insisting that HTML be a true markup language. If there is any HTML in the db entries for a comment, then there's no reason you can argue that, as a matter of principle, the paragraph tag doesn't belong there, too.

If you really want to keep the display markup distinct then you'll need to either disallow markup as content or actually parse the markup and seperate display from content. By disallowing most tags, Matt is effectively doing the former; but by allowing a few tags he's allowing display markup as content and treating it as such.

I think in practice, you'll find that most CMSs have a great deal of display markup as content because that's how people actually use HTML.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 6:53 PM on December 9, 2005

<sex style="missionary">
<foreplay>
"oooo yeah"
</foreplay>
<sex>
...
"you forgot the close tag!"
"that's not XSEXML!"
posted by todbot at 12:18 PM on December 10, 2005