Best option for Wiki-like Text Editor to preserve original markup? [closed]

Question

We have the need for a web-based wiki-like rich editor able to preserve original markup. At the moment a given custom markup is being converted to html for display and edit (allowing people to edit html in case of links and similar) then converted back to the specific markup when saving. This is obviously error prone and not ideal.

A first big decision is between a pure javascript html based solution (like TinyMCE) and a more client oriented solution with things like flash or silverlight that would allow us not to worry about html and so forth.

What are the best options at the moment in your experience?

Answer 1

This is a long discussion. My advise is to use a JavaScript with good XHTML output. Don't use flash or silverlight at all.

For my project I've used the YUI text Editor and everything worked really good. Try it here : http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/editor/skinning_editor.html

Try this link, it's a really good web editor comparison, to get what you need:

• http://geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/WebEditors
• http://blog.webdistortion.com/2008/03/09/9-of-the-best-rich-text-editors-reviewed/

Answer 2

The kind of users and the environment in which the data is used has a lot to say. HTML is a presentational format, so using it to edit content in, is suboptimal. In many cases, you need to separate content from presentation, and then HTML will cause you trouble because of this. You can of course try to restrict the input to a subset of HTML, but this is hard to get right and it kind of cripples the idea in the first place, because the input is then no longer really wysiwyg. CMS have struggled with this problem for years, so I guess there's no easy solution to it.

If you editors are power users (probably programmers, but I've had success with mere mortals), you can have them input content in markdown or a similar content-centric format and then transform it to HTML on presentation. The biggest hurdle for this approach seems to be the lack of realtime preview (wysiwyg). I've used Showdown to render a preview in realtime, like this site does - and I've recently made a widget for a sort of hybrid wysiwyg type of input, that you may find usable.