Ten things I hate dislike about the WYSIWYG Editor

Everyone's been lovey dovey over the new WYSIWYG editor (JfZ, future, forum guide, hacks) While I, despite my initial "enthusiasm", still think that it has lots of problem room for improvement.

The WYSIWYG editor is at the very core, the most important feature on Blogdrive. Without it... you would be wondering how a blog host can ever be a blog host. And we really don't expect writers to be able to write properly, right?

1) Insert Link opens a new window? This has to be the most annoying small problem. Everytime I need to insert a link, I'll need to wait till the new window loads before I can do anything else. This is a pain especially on MSIE because it takes a long time for MSIE to open a new window. Blogdrive should really just reduce to using a "prompt" javascript function to do the magic. It's less complicated and faster. Not to mention no new HTTPrequest to the Blogdrive server while editing.

Another problem is that it'll not work if the text you highlighted contains an apostrophy ' or ' . For example if you write: "Seige's dog", and wanting to add a link to these words, it'll not copy the "Seige's dog" to the window. This is a Javascript bug.

2) Different browser syntax rendering - on Firefox it's "XHTML Transitional" while on MSIE it's "plain old HTML" with CAPITALS. You can notice the differences if you use the "HTML View" feature located at the right bottom of the editor. It's odd although

3) Up Down Left Right button doesn't work sometimes - can't move the focus of the text cursor basically but the weird thing about this is... it only happen sometimes. And as for me, I can't identify what is the source of this problem.

4) In HTML View, the text cursor isn't always where it should be - more often than not it appears to be one or two characters away. How and why this happens is a mystery. It usually happens when I have a long entry that I needed to edit. It has something to do with miscalculating the string lengths or something along those lines.

5) Undo/Redo doesn't work sometimes - Again, this is odd and I can't tell why it doesn't work. It happens to both Firefox and MSIE.

6) Outdent/Indent uses different elements sometimes - I would really prefer the editor to implement the <BLOCKQUOTE> elements, it works great on MSIE but on Firefox, it uses <div> with margins set to indent it... how cruel.

7) Save post to clip board works on MSIE only - it doesn't work on Firefox mainly because Firefox is stupid for not supporting the copy-to-clipboard function. Sadly.

8) Firefox browser crash when reloading editor sometimes - Again, this is another one of the "sometimes" problem. It's just weird and I just can't make it out why. Don't take me wrong that it could be other webpages I'm viewing because the window crashed a few times and it's always during reloading of the editor in Firefox.

9) Can't insert Scripts or Objects - That's due to security reasons but for someone like me who do need to use some Javascripts, it's . Though... I shouldn't fret because I still have the beloved PTE.

10) Help Guide is coming soon ever since the big bang - See that "?" up there on the top right hand corner? Ever clicked on it, No? Don't bother.

I somehow realise that all these problems have almost everything to do with browser inconsistencies. Still I don't see why an editor should be flawed just because of certain browser not working perfectly well.

Wondering if Blogdrive will ever be bothered to fix these minor things? Nah, never. Not in a century or two.

Ever since Blogdrive fixed the PTE, it has so far been a million times better than WYSIWYG editor. Although it doesn't mean it's all great (because it doesn't work all well in Firefox/Opera), it's still better than WYSIWYG editor.

Tags: Blogdrive, WYSIWYG, Plain Text Editor, PTE, Editor,