Summary of Rich Text Editing in JavaScript

A rich text editor is an online service that allows users to edit rich text within web browsers, and serialise it in a number of formats (such as plain text/HTML/insertion of embedded image types etc.). It is generally used as part of another service, for example Web publishing, Web-based email (Gmail uses it heavily) and other similar services.

Comparison of several editors: http://geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/WebEditors.

However, the top 2 main ones are:

TinyMCE

is a platform-independent web-based JavaScript/HTML WYSIWYG editor control, released as open source software.. It has the ability to convert HTML textarea fields or other HTML elements to editor instances. TinyMCE is designed to easily integrate with content management systems.

TinyMCE integrates with many different open source systems, such as Mambo, Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress and e107.

TinyMCE is compatible with multiple browers across multiple Operating Systems including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome. There is limited support for Opera (haha Chris).

Install guide can be found here .

FCKeditor

is an open source WYSIWYG text editor that can be used in web pages. It aims to be lightweight and requires no client-side installation.

Its core code is written in JavaScript, having server side interfaces with Active-FoxPro, ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java, JavaScript, Lasso, Perl, PHP and Python.

The FCK in FCKeditor stands for Frederico Caldeira Knabben (Although most people think otherwise from first glance).

It doesn’t seem to like IIS. When we try to create a page with a text editor in it, it throws a page cannot be found (for the area with the editor), but works great in Apache.