WYSIWYG bad?

[Shawn G]

Hey all,

Many people say the WYSIWYG editors are bad? I am wondering what makes them so bad and how you all feel about them in general?

I have disabled them from being used here, personally... its because it was really buggy on this forum or at least for me.

 

[ARG_aaf]

I have always found them buggy, especially when using a portal and I rarely if ever use a WYSIWYG myself.

 

[live627]

Only WYSIWYG I've ever used is MS Word. Ohh, for the web? No, they have roaches crawling all over! I've never used SMF's editor. We even disabled it when we wanted to use the editor in Dream Portal.

 

[famade]

I've seen a few different WYSIWYG implementations over time, but most of the time they all suck, and for the same reason - you end up spending far more time trying to massage the content into a form you want instead of just writing it, and the same incidentally holds true of Word (based on all the issues my former colleagues had with trying to format documents)

 

[die2mrw007]

Guys, I have used WYSIWYG of many forum softwares... I must say, its good infact for easy use
But what I see in SMF is really unfinished one...seriously, it needs to be improved a lot

I mostly prefer not to use WYSIWYG simply because I am more used to this basic editor than the WYSIWYG one....

 

[Shawn G]

Guys, I have used WYSIWYG of many forum softwares... I must say, its good infact for easy use
But what I see in SMF is really unfinished one...seriously, it needs to be improved a lot

I mostly prefer not to use WYSIWYG simply because I am more used to this basic editor than the WYSIWYG one....



Every WYSIWYG editor I have used on any forum software has given some sort of error, even paid software. In fact most of the time, my knowledge of coding has been the only thing that helps me fix what WYSIWYG has screwed up...

 

[die2mrw007]

Guys, I have used WYSIWYG of many forum softwares... I must say, its good infact for easy use
But what I see in SMF is really unfinished one...seriously, it needs to be improved a lot

I mostly prefer not to use WYSIWYG simply because I am more used to this basic editor than the WYSIWYG one....



Every WYSIWYG editor I have used on any forum software has given some sort of error, even paid software. In fact most of the time, my knowledge of coding has been the only thing that helps me fix what WYSIWYG has screwed up...
yeah..but its atleast 80% fine...I do accept there are some errors with some of its functions.
But in SMF, i see a lot issues with this editor....it isnt well coded or well finished unlike other forum softwares

 

[Shawn G]

80% is just not good enough for me...

Which is why I choose not to partake in it

If I can use code and get 100%... why use the lazy way out and get 80%?

 

[famade]

Most of the other systems use an off-the-shelf one, while SMF's isn't (and as I discussed with its developer, they chose to do so for security reasons - more than one vulnerability in other systems has been down to the WYSIWYG editor)

 

[FranK_aaf]

I've never been a fan of WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver, Namo Web Editor, ...
HTML is very simple, a WYSIWYG editor is really not needed for this.
CSS is a bit more complicated. And WYSIWYG editors make it even more complicated.

 

[JAMMAN]

If you are referring to the windows you use to type in for forums and blogs, WYSIWYG is impossible to get to work browser wide, and if it does work the next release of IE will certainly kill some function. Firefox has been bad too.

 

[TheMightyEddy]

To be honest, they can be very glitchy at times but it's way easier than coding it.

 

[famade]

To be honest, they can be very glitchy at times but it's way easier than coding it.



Interesting to hear a programmer say that. Every other programmer I know swears by using bbcode for the simple fact that it does what they ask it to.

 

[Librarian2000]

After a brief flirtation with WYSIWYG web-design programs way-back-when (when I was first learning), I went to hand coding my pages - hand coding means I can control things by element and css - not absolutely everything positioned by individual divs. Plus I know it's valid except for the exceptions I need.

For my forums, they get bbcode. Let's face it - most people only use a few of the tags and preview and instant view (if available) should show people what they've done before posting.

 

[Shawn G]

Yeah for a dev, coding is the way to go. For a member, bbcodes is the way. I hate wysiwyg editors with a passion

 

[CityGirlLuv]

The only WYSIWYG editor I've ever used was Dreamweaver. All the others that I have tried are full of bugs. I won't even let myself touch another one except Dreamweaver.

 

[famade]

Even Dreamweaver's one is pretty poor, to be honest though it's still the best of a bad bunch.

Though really I think the question was aimed less about editors for mainline code and more about using WYSIWYG editors for editing posts and so on in a forum...?

 

[Nero96]

Whenever I used such editors, I spent a lot of time fixing some small time issues that these editors caused. I always had to re-code some parts in order to get it fixed, and it took away some of my time that I could have spend on better things.

 

[paradox235]

WYSIWYG editors can be a little annoying, especially for people who can't type/code that fast. Dreamweaver is pretty good, but I just hate it when after typing a tag, you automatically get the closing tag . I'm not used to that.