TinyMCE editor is the absolute pits!
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Be forwarned...a RANT ahead...
I have been making changes to a site I am developing. Changes made in a way that a typical user might make them.
Making something bold that is not bold here and there. Centering a line of text. Adding some spacing. Etc.
And let me tell you...the TinyMCE is utter nonsense!
I kid you not.
It adds all kinds of superflous HTML code to the code with just about every change such that if I end up making a number of changes I end up with a formatting nightmare.
It still uses STRONG.
It deletes style classes I put into various tags for pieces of content that can only really be best styled using styles that are defined in my main style sheet.
I mean this thing is just ridiculous. I spend more time fighting with this thing than creating content for the site.
And this is supposed to be the best WYSIWYG editor around?
And no it is not because I just haven't learned to work with it or am trying to do things that it was not built to do or some such thing.
I am making some very simple changes and it consistently screws things up on me.
And my clients, who are not web savy, will undoubtedly mess things up and wonder why in the world their changes don't work.
About the only thing this thing is good for is changing some text. As for formatting stuff...forget it!
Carlos
I have been making changes to a site I am developing. Changes made in a way that a typical user might make them.
Making something bold that is not bold here and there. Centering a line of text. Adding some spacing. Etc.
And let me tell you...the TinyMCE is utter nonsense!
I kid you not.
It adds all kinds of superflous HTML code to the code with just about every change such that if I end up making a number of changes I end up with a formatting nightmare.
It still uses STRONG.
It deletes style classes I put into various tags for pieces of content that can only really be best styled using styles that are defined in my main style sheet.
I mean this thing is just ridiculous. I spend more time fighting with this thing than creating content for the site.
And this is supposed to be the best WYSIWYG editor around?
And no it is not because I just haven't learned to work with it or am trying to do things that it was not built to do or some such thing.
I am making some very simple changes and it consistently screws things up on me.
And my clients, who are not web savy, will undoubtedly mess things up and wonder why in the world their changes don't work.
About the only thing this thing is good for is changing some text. As for formatting stuff...forget it!
Carlos
There's nothing wrong with the strong statement?
CSS came in and blew away the need for such statements!
If you hardcode a statement like STRONG into the code (like TinyMCE does), if you ever want to change a bolded text to unbolded...guess what?
You have to go into every single block of content you have ever created and manually (unless you know how to write a MySQL scraping script to change it for you) remove the STRONG. That's no picnic.
As opposed to simply making a CSS class, putting it in front of such content, and then changing one line in one file...the CSS file to make a change to the font-style.
Using statements like STRONG hard coded into HTML is going backwards. It's like going back to the stone age of coding!
Sorry but I disagree that there is nothing wrong with using statements like STRONG. Wrong from a web development best practices I mean.
TinyMCE is built to continue poor coding practices in that it does not produce good HTML by today's CSS enhancing standards. It continues to use outdated tags like EM, STRONG and probably otherwise. It also sticks a bunch of inline CSS hardcoded into the HTML which defeats the whole purpose of easy to change CSS either in the header of website pages or in separate CSS files.
Often it just up and sticks in a bunch of inline CSS for no apparent reason.
It's like we are encouraging the very thing that has become completely outdated with respect to how to best develop web sites coding wise.
That's just plain...well...ridiculous if you ask me.
I for one want to take advantage of best practices for creating web sites. Not feel forced to make exceptions because some editor like TinyMCE choses to remain in the stone ages.
Again just my opinion. You are of course free to disagree and that's fine.
But I just finished blowing away all my Content blocks (after copying them of course) and switched them to HTML blocks (which are a breath of fresh air in comparison).
I'll be creating my own Content block for my clients just as soon as I am able using a much better editor for my purposes.
Carlos
CSS came in and blew away the need for such statements!
If you hardcode a statement like STRONG into the code (like TinyMCE does), if you ever want to change a bolded text to unbolded...guess what?
You have to go into every single block of content you have ever created and manually (unless you know how to write a MySQL scraping script to change it for you) remove the STRONG. That's no picnic.
As opposed to simply making a CSS class, putting it in front of such content, and then changing one line in one file...the CSS file to make a change to the font-style.
Using statements like STRONG hard coded into HTML is going backwards. It's like going back to the stone age of coding!
Sorry but I disagree that there is nothing wrong with using statements like STRONG. Wrong from a web development best practices I mean.
TinyMCE is built to continue poor coding practices in that it does not produce good HTML by today's CSS enhancing standards. It continues to use outdated tags like EM, STRONG and probably otherwise. It also sticks a bunch of inline CSS hardcoded into the HTML which defeats the whole purpose of easy to change CSS either in the header of website pages or in separate CSS files.
Often it just up and sticks in a bunch of inline CSS for no apparent reason.
It's like we are encouraging the very thing that has become completely outdated with respect to how to best develop web sites coding wise.
That's just plain...well...ridiculous if you ask me.
I for one want to take advantage of best practices for creating web sites. Not feel forced to make exceptions because some editor like TinyMCE choses to remain in the stone ages.
Again just my opinion. You are of course free to disagree and that's fine.
But I just finished blowing away all my Content blocks (after copying them of course) and switched them to HTML blocks (which are a breath of fresh air in comparison).
I'll be creating my own Content block for my clients just as soon as I am able using a much better editor for my purposes.
Carlos
Unfortunately, you are WAY off on this one.
The <strong> tag replaced <b> tag because <strong> does not denote styling associated with it. You can style strong however you want.
You say a simple line in a CSS to unbold everything... something like this:
strong { font-weight: normal; }
Not only is there nothing WRONG with the <strong> tag, it's absolutely the semantically correct tag to use. There's a reason why <b> and <i> are deprecated, but <strong> and <em> are encouraged, they're the CORRECT tags to use.
The <strong> tag replaced <b> tag because <strong> does not denote styling associated with it. You can style strong however you want.
You say a simple line in a CSS to unbold everything... something like this:
strong { font-weight: normal; }
Not only is there nothing WRONG with the <strong> tag, it's absolutely the semantically correct tag to use. There's a reason why <b> and <i> are deprecated, but <strong> and <em> are encouraged, they're the CORRECT tags to use.
Hmm...well...hmm...me thinks I stand corrected on the use of the STRONG statement.
I still can't stand TinyMCE though LOL.
Carlos
I still can't stand TinyMCE though LOL.
Carlos
I have to agree with you, except for the statement that it's "supposed to be the best editor around." Nowhere have I seen that statement made.
-Steve
-Steve
Well, it's a pain, but you can create custom blocks for every kind of content that just have testboxes and textareas that generate the right HTML, but the user doesn't have to fiddle with anything. A pain though.
I've love to see a supercharged version of something like this:
http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/designer-content/...
built into core.
I've love to see a supercharged version of something like this:
http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/designer-content/...
built into core.
Hmm...interesting block there. I'll have to play with it sometime.
May I ask what you mean by supercharged?
Just curious.
Carlos
May I ask what you mean by supercharged?
Just curious.
Carlos
I too am very curious what you mean by "supercharged" -- I am hoping to make a big round of improvements in the next few weeks. (And btw, if you're a developer, the designer content code is up on github so by all means make some improvements and submit them back to the project --https://github.com/jordanlev/c5_designer_content... )
Carlos, I *totally* agree with your sentiments. TinyMCE is terrible (so is every other WYSIWYG editor in my experience -- it's just a very hard problem to solve). And I agree with 1stWebDesigns's approach to try and structure your theme so that TinyMCE can be avoided as much as possible (except for changing some text and choosing an h1 or h2 here and there) -- that's exactly why I went through the trouble of creating the Designer Content addon.
-Jordan
Carlos, I *totally* agree with your sentiments. TinyMCE is terrible (so is every other WYSIWYG editor in my experience -- it's just a very hard problem to solve). And I agree with 1stWebDesigns's approach to try and structure your theme so that TinyMCE can be avoided as much as possible (except for changing some text and choosing an h1 or h2 here and there) -- that's exactly why I went through the trouble of creating the Designer Content addon.
-Jordan
I didn't realize the Designer thingy was your creation Jordan. Given that it is I will definitely be taking a closer look see seeing as how the last block I downloaded that was yours was well written and gave me the heads up knowledge to be able to launch out and create my own form block.
Thanks for your input (as always).
Carlos
Thanks for your input (as always).
Carlos
"There's nothing wrong with the strong statement? CSS came in and blew away the need for such statements! If you hardcode a statement like STRONG into the code (like TinyMCE does), if you ever want to change a bolded text to unbolded...guess what?"
How about:
strong { font-weight:normal; }
I agree that <b> is incorrect because it implies the text should be bold, which you might not always want it to be. But <strong> just implies you want text to stand out in some way - using CSS that could be by making the text bold or by making it have a yellow background.
Also, voice output systems may pronounce content inside the strong tag in a louder voice.
If you want to change the style globally (say from bold to yellow highlight) it's the same whether you style the <strong> tag or style a class name. And if you want to remove or change just one instance, you've either got to remove the class name or remove the <strong> tag so there is not much difference there.
Besides which, if TinyMCE didn't use the <strong> tag it would do something like this instead:
<span style="font-weight:bold">My bold text</span>
In my opinion inline styles are far, far worse than the <strong> tag. If you're dead against it, you'd be better off removing the bold button from the editor and adding a custom class to the styles dropdown.
How about:
strong { font-weight:normal; }
I agree that <b> is incorrect because it implies the text should be bold, which you might not always want it to be. But <strong> just implies you want text to stand out in some way - using CSS that could be by making the text bold or by making it have a yellow background.
Also, voice output systems may pronounce content inside the strong tag in a louder voice.
If you want to change the style globally (say from bold to yellow highlight) it's the same whether you style the <strong> tag or style a class name. And if you want to remove or change just one instance, you've either got to remove the class name or remove the <strong> tag so there is not much difference there.
Besides which, if TinyMCE didn't use the <strong> tag it would do something like this instead:
<span style="font-weight:bold">My bold text</span>
In my opinion inline styles are far, far worse than the <strong> tag. If you're dead against it, you'd be better off removing the bold button from the editor and adding a custom class to the styles dropdown.
Well put 1stWebDesign (interesting name you got there)!
I have hereby granted you the distinction of Best Answer for your response :)
Using CSS to define away the normal rendering of the STRONG html tag is something I had not thought about.
Glad to hear you agree with me about the inline styles being bad at least.
Carlos
I have hereby granted you the distinction of Best Answer for your response :)
Using CSS to define away the normal rendering of the STRONG html tag is something I had not thought about.
Glad to hear you agree with me about the inline styles being bad at least.
Carlos
hello guys,
i have problem. how to use <b> instead <strong> in text?
i have problem. how to use <b> instead <strong> in text?
As for the superflous HTML, welcome to the world of content management. It's exactly the reason I try and avoid it unless it's an absolute requirement. A WYSIWYG editor can never replace someone who's experienced at writing markup by hand.
With C5 what I do try and do is organise sections of the page into areas, and make as many areas as possible a simple text block (rather than HTML) so the formatting is controlled by the design rather than the content. I appreciate in many areas this isn't always possible though.