Forum OpenACS Development: HTMLArea - Current Issues and Future Development

Basic but seems to work well and load very quickly. Produces html with inline CSS styles and supports uploading of style sheets (though implementation of oacs would need thought). Free of charge but not clear if GPL.

Areaedit http://www.htmlarea.com/directory/Detailed/185.html

A fork from Xinha which means a fork from the original HTMLArea that we are using. In active development , simple (not ladened down with features), targeted at business users so suitable for oacs, loads quickly - seems to work well. GPL.

aynhtml http://www.htmlarea.com/directory/Detailed/64.html

This is simple and uncluttered, and works really well. Seems to produce really beautifully clean and readable html with inline CSS. Very nice - GPL.

Ekit http://www.htmlarea.com/directory/Detailed/71.html

Written in Java so requires client machine to install the Java runtime component. Slow to load. Once loaded works beautifully. Produces ‘quite’ clean html with some inline CSS components but seems to be using some deprecated tags such as the font tag. Quotes ‘Free, Open Source, but not clear if actually GPL.

FCKEditor http://www.fckeditor.net/demo/demo02.html

Works very well and supports pasting from Microsoft Word (many end users do sadly!), I18N for charsets, word searches. Also supports forms and textboxes which would need thought as far as integration is concerned. Seems to writes html without CSS and uses many deprecated html tags. GPL.

Richtext Editor http://www.htmlarea.com/directory/Detailed/83.html

Opensource (not clear if GPL). No obvious activity on website since 2003. Seems to use deprecated html tags and no CSS.

tmfeditor http://www.htmlarea.com/directory/Detailed/166.html

Very nice, newly developed, produces tidy html. Says it requires ASP or PHP for image upload but don't think that applies if we used it since we can refer to photo-album uploaded images. Uses CSS in places but I notice that alignment of images was a

rather than a CSS position. Creative Commons License rather then GPL.

Xinha http://www.htmlarea.com/directory/Detailed/123.html

Recursive name, Xinha is not html area. This is a fork of htmlarea and is still under active development. Seems to be overloaded with plugins and takes an eternity to load. Demo seems to be of incomplete version. Not sure how rigorous they are with version control and releases. Probably fine but a bit too feature infested and slow to download methinks.

Htmlarea3 http://www.dynarch.com/projects/htmlarea/

This is the editor that we include in the OpenACS distribution and disappointingly is a discontinued project. However from my own experiments with it I have concluded that the version that we include is rather flakey. Various components do not work including some quite important ones such as addition of images, full screen mode etc. The editor is clearly very functional and loads reasonably quickly and I can see why it was the choice at the time. I am guessing that we have the previous released version in OpenACS.

Before it was discontinued there was a complete re-write for version3. There is in fact a pre-release version 3.0 rc1 available for download and Dynarch have been promising an rc2 but so far nothing has materialised. In the meantime the project was discontinued by one party without the agreement and consent of the other! 😊

The demo of version 3 seems to load quickly and work well. The html produced is not tidy at all but does use inline and linked CSS.

From the Dynarch site:
Update, March 8 2005. Some time ago, InteractiveTools expressed the will to take over the project. We provided some fixes that we made and were not in the CVS version and a RC2 was released at htmlarea.com; however, soon thereafter InteractiveTools announced the project closed and forums discontinued. Bang!

Our position on this is that the editor will keep going; we are actually making quite some progress in its development, but only in house at this time. We are still planning to release version 3.0, quite possibly under a different name (so it might actually be a 1.0) but still free, at least for the core editor--some plugins might be released under a commercial license. We can't provide explicit deadlines, so please bear with us.