Surprisingly there are very few decent, open source HTML WYSIWYG editor controls. There are a whole collection of them but most are out of date or way too feature rich and heavy.
I recently required a HTML WYSIWYG editor control for a project I was working on and so spent a couple of hours reviewing and testing the available options. Here are the few which are actually worth considering.
"Tiny"mce weights in at a hefty 176K compressed. It is one of the most popular HTML editor controls around and is quite flexible with plenty of themes and plugins. It also quite active with a new release out every 2-4 months. It was easy enough to get up and running but I found the plug-ins fairly limited and styling it was just too much work.
The file size of FCKEditor depends on the browser used to render it. In my tests it came in at about 72K compressed. This is one of the granddaddy HTML editors. It has lots of features and a large web following. Unfortunately I found it just too heavy to work with. The docs weren’t great and the download, all 1.5MB of it, was so cluttered with features, plugins and skins that it was too difficult to just get something simple going. It has gathered too many features in its life to suit my needs. The team are hard at work on a total rewrite (version 3.0) which may address this.
A nice fairly light framework. Depending on which features you want to use it weights in between 25 – 32K. It uses the famfam icon set for its tool bar buttons (I’m a huge fan of famfam) and so has a nice clean look. As with the FCKEditor and tinymce editors, NicEdit has problems generating semantically clean XHTML. There is an experimental nicXHTML plugin which addresses this. It has known problems but so far it seems to be working fine for my needs.
It has some lovely behavior built right in such as auto-expanding the text area to ensure all the content is displayed. No more grippies! Overall I thought NicEdit was well put together.
Built on Prototype this library weighs in at 53K (before compression). At the time of writing wysihat is at version 0.2. I had previously worked with 0.1 and the new version does fix a lot of problems. However, it still isn’t ready for prime time. On Firefox and Safari it works well but IE support lets it down. Having said this wysihat is, in my opinion, the future. It is small, lite and easy to extend. A project I’m rooting for and definitely one to keep an eye on. And the winner is…
In the end I went with NicEdit. Its just so much better than the existing heavy weights and wysihat needs some more love before its ready for production. I’m sure there will be some problems with NicEdit but I feel I’m starting from a good base. I’ll keep you updated on how NicEdit holds up as development continues.
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