In Search of a Lightweight WYSIWYG Client

By Deane Barker • • 6 min read •
AI Summary

This post explores the author’s quest for a lightweight WYSIWYG editor that balances functionality and performance. The author discusses various options, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses, while sharing insights on the challenges of finding an editor that meets specific needs for efficient web content creation.

I’m interested in finding a nice, lightweight, WYSIWYG HTML editor for use by non-developers. In this scenario, as I’m sure you know, is not having too little functionality, but having too much. I haven’t found one yet that I’m comfortable unleashing on non-developer content editors.

How about FrontPage or Dreamweaver, you say? Dreamweaver is too complicated for the average editor to grasp. Yes, I know it makes perfect to HTML jockeys, but it’s not for the faint-of-heart. FrontPage is simpler, but I’ve found it gives the user too much rope. They end up with more than enough to hang themselves.

Contribute from Macromedia comes close. It’s a scaled-down version of Dreamweaver, but it’s not problem-free. It requires some voodoo to get it up and running and I didn’t find that it was easy to edit file system-based files. Contribute is at its best when used on a site managed by a geek with a copy of Dreamweaver.

Surprisingly, Mozilla Composer – part of the Mozilla Suite – is very good. Not quite perfect, but it’s clean and simple. However, you have to have the whole Mozilla shindig to use it. I hope they break it off into its own product.

What I’m looking for is a WYSIWYG editor with which I could let a user edit a pre-created site. Using some strategic rewrite rules, a limited FTP account, and php_append and php_prepend files, you could very easily build a nice, maintainable site that handles all the common elements of the page, leaving just the “content valley” to be managed by a content editor with a lightweight WYSIWYG client.

Now if I could just find the right one. Any recommendations?

Update: One last requirement: the client needs to be page-centric. Too many HTML editors drift off into concepts of “the Site” or “the Web.” I want one that is concerned pretty much solely with the page that’s currently loaded into it, and doesn’t try to wrap its arms around the entire Web site at once.

Links from this – Protecting Content Editors From Themselves September 21, 2004
Say you put together a nice, static site for a client. There’s a lot of CSS, a fair amount of scripting (in whatever language – we’ll assume PHP here), a handful of images, and a lot of HTML. The client is going to manage the site with a WYSIWYG editor. What’s the biggest danger to your site? The...