A WYSIWYG HTML editor for web browsers.
Who's-a-whig?
The interweb, as you've probably noticed by now, runs on HTML. The reason that you've probably noticed this, is that we're constantly required to type that shit in. In emails, in bulletin boards, and wouldn't you just know it, in E2 writeups.
Back in the day, all software used to work like this. You'd type in one thing, and in whatever final output you expected from your program (and, usually, your 9-pin dot matrix printer), it would look like something else. Then in the '80s, some bright spark came up with the idea of WYSIWYG: make stuff look like it's going to look as you type it in. This caught on, for almost all normal 'user-friendly' software. The only place it didn't become pervasive was in applications, such as LaTeX, used by us dyed-in-the-wool ass-backwards UNIX types. For 'normal' people, WYSIWYG is regarded as an absolute necessity.
Except, for some bizarre unfathomable reason, on the web, where otherwise normal people are required to type in ugly combinations of angle brackets and acronyms. And this is the medium that's supposed to be the great leveller?
What the internet needs, then, is some of that WYSIWYG stuff we've been hearing so much about. It'd have been done long before if it wasn't for the fact that web browsers have lacked a consistent interface for developers to write a WYSIWYG HTML editor against, until very recently.
With javascript and the HTML Document Object Model, and a couple of other tricks, we've seen a few WYSIWYIG editors emerging recently. Perhaps the best of these, and certainly my current favourite, is TinyMCE.
TinyMCE
From Moxiecode Systems AB, TinyMCE is an HTML editor that's open source, with active development from a company that offers commercial support for the product. It's not overly heavyweight to download (less than 50k if your server has mod_gzip), it's highly configurable and and it can be quickly and easily retrofitted to existing websites, replacing TEXTAREA elements with HTML editors.
Unlike other HTML editors I've tried recently (eg. HTMLArea), it actually seems to perform reasonably efficiently and quickly. HTMLArea, by contrast, was a CPU hog.
I said it's easy to retrofit to existing web sites. Let me go ahead and put my money where my mouth is here. Make sure your Notelet nodelet it turned on, and head on over to Notelet Editor, take a copy of anything you've already got in there, and add the following to it:
<script language="javascript"
type="text/javascript"
src="http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js">
</script><script language="javascript"
type="text/javascript"><!--
tinyMCE.init({mode : "textareas",theme : "advanced"});
// --></script>
Congratulations, you've just made E2 WYSIWYG. Well, more or less. Naturally, TinyMCE doesn't know about ecore square bracket links, and the 'HTML' popup to edit the source code in raw HTML, should you feel inclined, won't work because of JavaScript's security model.
But it sure beats typing raw HTML now, doesn't it?
You can read more about it, including full API documentation, and even try it out over at http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/.