That subject line got you interested, right? “Finally, they’ve
implemented a better rich text editor!” Sorry, but no… we want *you*
to implement a better rich text editor.
Open Laszlo 3.4 has a rich text editor, but it’s not very good. It’s
inherently limited by Flash Player 7’s support for rich text, which
seems to have been designed to display rich text, not to support
interactive text format editing. With the DHTML runtime for Open
Laszlo 4, we’re free of the constraints of the Flash player(s), and
into a whole new frying pan: the constraints of the browsers. There
are lots of other projects which work in that particular frying pan;
in particular, other development efforts have already written
javascript-based rich text editors. (TinyMCE from moxiecode comes to
mind.) Some of these are free, open, and cross-browser-capable.
Combine one of those with the Open Laszlo <html> tag, and we could
finally have a good rich text editor in Open Laszlo.
This is a good place for a community contributor; could you integrate
an existing DHTML rich text editor into the Open Laszlo 4 platform?
To do this, you’d have to learn some cool new tricks, which haven’t
been documented much yet: the <switch> tag, the #pragma compiler hint
mechanism, the runtime-specific compile-time constants, and probably
some stuff we haven’t figured out how to do yet, like including a
third-party library. You’d help us design and develop the platform
support that developers will need to integrate a third-party
javascript library, and you’d implement the first dhtml-specific
extension. And you could choose which third-party editor to integrate.
Anybody interested?
-ben
...also posted as http://weblog.openlaszlo.org/archives/2007/07/a-
better-rich-text-editor-for-open-laszlo-4/
- [Laszlo-user] a better rich text editor for Open Laszlo 4 Benjamin Shine
-
