Hi Davis,
A history of Taesk & editors.
The original design goal was to keep HTML out of the database. We wanted to disallow any form of HTML input by the administrator because we wanted all the websites to display valid HTML. If HTML editing was allowed the result would be that administrators could input some (invalid) HTML which again would turn the actual websites into invalid HTML.
In short we wanted the system to ensure that the the clients websites always contained 100% valid HTML, by making it impossible for administrators to perform any action that would compromise this.
To this end we developed a markup language (a domain specific language) lets call it TML, which would be "compiled" into valid HTML, for this we used a regular textarea as input/editor in the CMS.
This method worked technically really well, but over the years the client demand for WYSIWYG editors increased.
We then developed a visual editing feature using the "designmode=true" feature of browsers to actually show and edit HTML directly - but trying hard to limit the type of HTML that it was possible to input, but we still insisted on not putting HTML directly into the database (and onwards to the actual website), so we had to develop a HTML -> TML compiler/converter - this is a real nightmare I can tell you... Anyway after much work we got it working to a "satisfying" degree.
One problem that existed with this way forward was that clients quite often liked to copy&paste content directly from Microsoft Word and into the editor - and out HTML->TML compiler although "good" was simply not good enough to handle the HTML that Microsoft word outputs.
At the same time competing CMS' boasted of exactly this feature, which they had an easy time doing since they allowed HTML to be inputted and saved directly into the database (in short they just saved and used the HTML output from MS Word). So pressure increased to provide this feature as well.
In the end we had to give in and abandon our TML way, and adapt a "common" dhtml editor (little reason to develop our own). For this purpose we evaluated a number of the available editors.
I was not the person who evaluated the different editors (I quickly asked he said: Look&Feel and features) - we wanted an editor that was flexible enough to allow us to integrate it with our custom media-archive (unlike other systems all binary files are kept in a database as well as a static file on disk), and I seem to recall that FCK was the only editor that allowed us to customize/integrate it without too much trouble.
I do know that we started by evaluating FCKeditor then moved on to other editors, but they were not as flexible enough, only to end up with FCKeditor again.
One reason from a business perspective is that FCK offers a dual licensing scheme - and allowed us to acquire a closed source license that would enable us to continue to sell Taesk with its own closed source license..
I hope this answers your question.
n.b. for the record I still believe that the TML way is the technical superior, since once we have the content internally in our own markup language we can then compile it to various formats from there e.g. WML, HTML, XML, etc.. But I do understand that the usability of a dhtml-editor is far superior.
Regards
Michael
Davis Waithaka wrote:
------------------------------------------------------------------------Hi Michael,
Congrats on TAESK. Is there specific reasons you chose FCK editor over other editors eg TinyMCE (i have a serious interest in this question)
Davis
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