WYSIBYG...What you see is "before" you get, uhhh... it

kirtid — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 09:19:00 GMT

One of the most requested controls in the Toolkit is a WYSIWYG editor. There are a bunch of rich text html editors floating around that serve this purpose, so wouldn't having this in the Toolkit be just a "me-too"? I have been thinking if there would be more ways in which our version could stand out. The Office 2007 UI enhanced the WYSIWYG experience greatly by allowing you live previews that demonstrate how your content will look if a particular feature button like "bold" or "font names" is selected. The WYSIBYG acronym comes from a Microsoftie who presented that MS Word feature at Microsoft's Company Meeting. I unfortunately do not remember his name to give him credit for the same. If you do then let me know and I will update the post.

I am writing this post in a Community Server WYSIWYG editor and I wondered if I could apply some learnings from the pains I experienced and introduce some more useful features in the Toolkit editor. If you take a look at my blog post on Slide Shows, it has some links in "blue" instead of the trademark pink enforced by my blog template. The mishap occurred because I was reluctant to write my blog in this editor and chose to use the outlook message editor to compose it before I would cut and paste it. It so turned out that the format was preserved (which is understandable but not what I wanted then). Since some of my content was written using the blog editor it had the right formatting but the editor did not have a "Format Painter" option (at least I could not find one that did something similar) to correct the styles copied over from outlook and hence the inconsistent look and feel. I was too lazy to manually fix that up and I can claim that I got lucky because I could use that to justify why we need format painting in the Toolkit editor.

For now I think a decent format painting story and live preview support sounds like a good start, hopefully to deter people from calling it "yet another wysiwyg editor"... What say?

Hello Kirti : editor

WYSIBYG...What you see is &quot;before&quot; you get, uhhh... it

WYSIBYG...What you see is "before" you get, uhhh... it