Now, this is just slick. Xinha isn’t my most favoritest browser-based WYSIWYG editor, but this plugin for Firefox, Xinha Here!, certainly moves it up a couple of notches.  No need to install anything on the server; just download the Firefox plugin, right-click on a text area in a web page, and choose “Xingha”.  And since it’s all local, it loads quickly and cleanly.

WYSIWYG web editors have come a long way since I started making CMS’s back around 1998. Back then, you needed a Java applet to do it. Nowadays, there’s an abundance of Javascript-based editors that work on most any browser (except Safari, usually, although it isn’t far off). Check ‘em out:

• TinyMCE
  


• Xinha
  


• FCKEditor
  

All free, and all pretty good.  You can even insert and format tables with these things, which even a lot of word processing progams have trouble with!



The Netscape/Mozilla guys had a lot to do with that.  Their inclusion of a top-notch HTML-editor (“Midas”, they call it) in the Mail component, and later as the self-contained Composer, set the bar for browsers.  And, it allowed Javascript developers to have access to that kind of functionality for free.

People with the patience and courage to delve into XUL, the basis of Firefox’s user interface, can do even more outrageous things.  Check out NVU, which is one of the more useful website managers I’ve seen.  It doesn’t do PHP, ColdFusion, or Flash, but it let’s you pump text and images into web pages faster than any other comparable product.  And it’s free, for Pete’s sake.

Slickety slick slick slick.  Niiiiice.

Yep.

Nice.