|
Project Information
|
IntroductionCurrent open source WYSIWYG editor controls (TinyMCE, FCKeditor, etc) typically only support one markup language (mostly HTML) as its backend, and their functionalities are hard-coded to use the language of choice, making it difficult, if possible at all, to use them when a different markup is required (e.g., in a forum, where you need BBcode; or a wiki, where MediaWiki, or a similar wiki markup is used). There are several problems with this approach:
Various markups are specifically designed to represent information more cleanly, securely, or suitable to a specific need. However, due to a lack of good WYSIWYG solutions, they are hard to use in the eyes of average web users. For example, despite of the various kinds of efforts made, Wikipedia (and the MediaWiki platform in general) still doesn't have a "perfect" solution for this problem. The simple approach to solve this problem might be to create converters between HTML and different markups, as a layer between existing WYSIWYG HTML editors and the server software. However, it won't work very well. The primary problem here is that these editors are designed with HTML editing in mind, which might be different than those markups not only in syntax details but also in philosophy. A best demonstration of this is an excerpt from the WYSIWYG editor page of the MediaWiki website: An editor should support the user in getting a headline right instead of using a big font, marking a citation instead of italicizing text, and so on. Imho most wysiwyg-editors lures people away from thinking about the meaning, and this is wrong. In contrast, Jaed is a JavaScript editor designed from scratch to support as many different markups as possible, as natively as possible, while also trying to maximize code reuse wherever possible. It has a component architecture with a minimal core, and all user-level functionalities are implemented using plugins. Current StatusThe project is in its infant stage, and no download is available yet. The source code of this project is currently hosted on GitHub. It's also preferred that you use the issue tracker there, however issues reported here will also be handled. |