Keith Devens .com

The problem with WYSIWYG editors is that every single one of them, without exception, produces absolute garbage HTML. The Microsoft based ones are the worst for this, but the Mozilla ones are pretty bad too. If you are building a content management system with an eye on reusability content this is a very bad thing - it encourages users to fill up the content database with precisely styled content which will be an absolute nightmare to reformat for alternative delivery systems.

Far more useful would be a "structural" rich text editor which limits users to headers, lists, paragraphs and so on and styles them using the site's default CSS stylesheet. I have yet to see this done anywhere (although the company I work for have a Flash based rich text editor under development which more or less does this).

Keith, if you build the list, do a search for WYSIWYG at OL, I post about them fairly often.

Simon your right in that most produce garbage markup. That's slowly starting to change though and I keep an eye out for any that have good CSS options.

If you are building a content management system with an eye on reusability content this is a very bad thing - it encourages users to fill up the content database with precisely styled content which will be an absolute nightmare to reformat for alternative delivery systems.

That's precisely why StructuredText is central to my CMS. Even your comments are ST!

But, for a quick CMS with a few pages, a WYSIWYG HTML editor would be a nice thing.