Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Pasting HTML into Xinha

3: Re: Pasting HTML into Xinha (response to 1)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 10/21/06 07:47 AM

Do we have an HTML Tidy in OpenACS? Meaning that we could run set content [tidy::html -content [lindex $content_body 0]]. Or does something like this exist in TCL(lib) or someplace else?

As much as I like XinHA, cleaning up HTML is something we should enforce on the server side as users are usually way to lazy to press the Tidy button if they are copy / pasting from Word et.al.

4: Re: Pasting HTML into Xinha (response to 3)

Posted by Janine Ohmer on 10/23/06 04:50 AM

I agree with you in principle, Malte, but in this case I want the filter to remove all of the incoming HTML and just leave the text, and that would be a bit drastic for a server-side filter.

It turns out that HTMLTidy has been superceded by SuperClean (http://xinha.python-hosting.com/wiki/SuperClean). I've tried it and it sort of works, but trying to use the Tidy option removes everything including the text, a tiny bit *too* tidy. :) I think this is because it wants to call Tidy via PHP, which is not going to work from xowiki.

The plugin I tried to implement, but could not get working, is here: http://xinha.python-hosting.com/ticket/349

The idea is to trap the paste command and instead of having the user paste directly into the text box, have them paste into a popup box instead. The code behind the box will strip all HTML out of the pasted text before passing it on to the real paste handler. Although I dislike popups I was willing to give it a try, but I could not get the popup to happen. No errors of any kind, it just didn't work.

Any other thoughts/suggestions?

6: Re: Pasting HTML into Xinha (response to 3)

Posted by Hamilton Chua on 12/21/06 03:03 PM

I looked deeper into the htmlarea.js file from xinha and I noticed that it supports cleaning word html.

In fact, there is a button with the icon of a word document with a red circle/slash that users can press to clean up the content in the textarea of any word cruft.

The javascript function (HTMLArea.prototype._wordClean ) that does this can be found in htmlarea.js and is called whenever that button with the word icon is clicked.

Also, I've found that you can automatically execute this function as soon as content is pasted by setting this.htmlareaPaste and this.killWordOnPaste to true in the htmlarea.js file.

However, htmlareaPaste works only in IE so for users that use mozilla based browsers, they will still need to click the clean word icon after pasting.

7: Re: Pasting HTML into Xinha (response to 6)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 12/21/06 04:23 PM

I think we should make the patch Hamilton proposes to be the default one in OpenACS. Or are we really concerned about pasted Word HTML "crap" ?

I assume from the way you have been describing it that you cannot make this a acs-parameter, can you?