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Mozile

dan Posted on Wed Feb 23 09:36:48 CST 2005

For the web developers among us, I present Mozile - the Mozilla In-Line Editor

Can be loaded as a server-side javascript download for anyone using a Mozilla browser to use, or installed on your local machine as an extension. As an extension you have the ability to make any web page editable. You can edit right in the page (MS Word WYSIWYG style) or split screen with rendered content at top and html code at the bottom. In the bottom html screen you can add html tags, css styles, javascript, whatever, and it is displayed up top as you type.

It's still very much beta, so not everything works, but enough of it does to make it very nifty tool.

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:: Response posted on 2005-02-23 by dan

To view updated html code where you edited when in WYSIWYG mode, select some of the text right-click and choose 'View Selection Source'. That will pop up a window with all the code within that block-level element.

:: Response posted on 2005-02-23 by Jim Drewes

Thats pretty sweet. I can see how that would be a great utility for content management websites - particularly websites that have a bunch of (basically) static pages.

:: Response posted on 2005-02-23 by Stu Belden

That's totally crazy. I bet we could use this to make department pages updatable by the departments themselves, without them having to use some crappy standalone WYSIWYG editor.

:: Response posted on 2005-02-23 by Jim Drewes

I didn't read too much about it, so maybe this question is obvious -

Wouldn't you need to have your users using mozilla (or firefox, I would assume) to get that to work? Too bad.

:: Response posted on 2005-02-23 by dan

IE has a javascript thing called document.designMode='on'; which I can't find great documentation on, but makes an element editable in the same manner as Mozilla (although according to Moz with less features). Mozilla has written up a how-to on converting a rich document from IE to Mozilla. I suppose you could read the how-to backwards to make an app for IE, and employ some browser sniffing to make it work for everyone.

Here is an interesting page full of bookmarklets, one of which enables page editing for both IE and Mozilla.

Amusingly, though, Mozilla acknowledges that at the moment editing cannot be turned 'off'. I've not experimented in IE very much. Note that this bookmarklet is a little different from Mozile in that it makes the whole page editable. Mebbe this can be narrowed to a single element, I don't know.

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