WYSIWYG editing in Mozilla

Having developed a WYSIWYG editor for IE, I'm happy to see that Mozilla 1.3+ has similar functionality. It even works in Firebird since it's based on the Mozilla code. The interesting thing will be to test it out on a Mac. This should theoretically offer cross-platform editing. My only complaint is use of the selection and range objects is different than IE. Since neither object appears to conform to any W3C standard, it would have been nice to mimic IE's approach. It certainly would have made porting code over a lot easier.

Here's a list of bookmarks:

  • The Midas spec details the document.execCommand() method. This seems close to the IE implementation which is nice.
  • The DOM specification for Mozilla including the Range object
  • The DOM reference doesn't talk about the selection object which is often key to manipulating items within the document. What I did find was the source interface for it. The Midas demo makes use of the selection object and is a good tutorial on building your own editor.

Examples:

  • The Midas demo
  • Interactive Tools made an IE and Mozilla compatible editor called htmlArea
Published November 08, 2003 · Updated September 17, 2005
Categorized as MSHTML and DEC
Short URL: https://snook.ca/s/90