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Thread: Re: CMS modernity (was: address tag)
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From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Thu, Nov 30 2006 9:50AM
Subject: Re: CMS modernity (was: address tag)
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> It does to a certain extent, but I'm not sure it goes far
> enough. In our's we've been fairly successful with that
> general approach so far, especially if you set things up to
> *look* wrong when the underlying code is wrong.
Yes, another excellent point.
As an example, I've given the 'blockquote style' a huge background image
of giant quote marks in hopes that people will stop using it just for
indenting. ;o)
> > That said, no matter how hard you try, someone can still
> STRONG a line
> > of text instead of making it a H* tag.
>
> True, although something like strong {display: run-in;} can
> highlight that if supported, or an "onsave" check could test
> for that.
Yep. Another good point. In fact, that's an idea...perhaps there's a
market (for commercial or free) add on that checks WYSIWYG editor
content pre-submission. Some sort of elaborate free-text validator of
sorts. Though I imagine it'd probably need to be fairly unique on a
per-site/section basis so maybe that's more of a pipe dream than a
practical application concept.
> One of my next posts is on preventing problems, if anyone
> would like to email me typical problems please do! I'll have
> a go at coming up with solutions that could be built into
> editors/CMSs.
A big problem we have is legacy content from unstructured word files. A
lot of lists get cut and pasted into the WYSIWYG editor that were never
actual Word lists to begin with, but rather just paragraphs with
hard-spacing and hand-numbered items. These are a pain to hunt down and
reformat one by one.
Another common problem is the 'click here' links that everyone
uses--though that is something that I suppose a validator script could
probably check for. In fact, I should probably just check for the phrase
'click here' and not let people submit the content unless that is fixed.
;o)
The final problem isn't really solvable via technology: a lot of folks
still write the content completely obvlivious to the fact that it will
be posted on a web page. You see lots of inline references like "see
below" or "see the next page" that only make sense when typing a memo.
We just need to better train staff to write for the web first, THEN
rewrite *if necessary* if you have to fax it as a memo or us it in some
other antiquated paper based medium. ;o)
> True, but if the editor came with a basic set that would
> reduce the pain significantly.
Ya know, that would be great. A template WITHIN the WYSIWYG editor
itself. That's a wonderful idea.
> > Also, while not ideal, Xstandard's table editor is fairly robust (I
> > noticed you were complaining about that in other WYSIWYG editors on
> > your blog).
>
> I've only tried the free one so far, which wasn't wrong, but
> didn't go far enough (if you look at the functionality I
> proposed). I'll try the paid for version when I'm at that stage.
One thing with Xstandard is that a lot of the functionality is hidden
via the contextual menu (right-click). Not an ideal UI concept.
-Darrel