I am trying to implement an interface where users can dynamically enter text and upload images. I wish for the interface to have these features:
The images should be moveable i.e, ability to drag and drop the images around.
The text entered should automatically wrap around the images.
How could I accomplish this? I have looked at some jquery scripts and also looked through HTML5's canvas features, but am unable to find a solution.
Thanks for your time.
EDIT: This video shows the effect I wish to obtain:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYnj4Mz9g9g
TL;DR
This is a common and desirable feature that has been discussed numerous times in the history of CSS, and there is a specification under development to make it possible. Unfortunately, implementations are few and far-between, and some implementers are reluctant to work on it. Doing it with JavaScript is a complex problem for any non-trivial layout; such a solution is unlikely to be fast enough for your purposes and you will fast approach the sort of markup you'd expect from a PDF-to-HTML converter.
Background
There are two questions here: irregular text flow and excluding text and other inline elements from an arbitrary region of the page.
This is not the first time either feature has been discussed for CSS. In particular, flowing text around irregular floated shapes was mentioned in a CSS level 1 working draft back in 1996, and Eric Meyer's ragged float demo dates from at least 2002. This is a long overdue feature!
In June 2007, James Elmore suggested adding position values to the float property, enabling elements to be positioned arbitrarily on the page while excluding other elements from flowing underneath.
SVG 1.2 initially specified a model for flowed text regions, and goes into some detail on how this would be implemented. Unfortunately, the latest version of the spec (which is still in development) blows this out of the water by noting that previous work will be replaced with "a superset of the SVG 1.2 Tiny textArea feature".
Current status (revised August 2012)
More recently, we have the CSS Exclusions specification, a proposal from Adobe and what you see being shown off in that video. As of August 2012, these have been implemented in IE 10 RTM and are slowly being rolled out in WebKit, but developers working for other vendors have expressed mixed feelings about the proposal.*
Trident (IE): implemented in IE10 platform preview and available in the RTM. (Referred to as "positioned floats" in IE Test Drive, similar to James Elmore's proposal.)
WebKit (Chrome, Safari): partially implemented, with patches gradually being approved for landing in the WebKit trunk, meaning we should start seeing this soon. (Bug 57311 - CSSRegions: add exclusions support in WebKit.)
Gecko (Firefox): unlikely to be implemented soon; bug currently resolved as WONTFIX. (Bug 672053 - Add support for CSS3 Positioned Floats—note David Baron's objections concerning interoperability.)
Presto (Opera): not yet implemented. (Bug tracker is private; I tried asking the ever gregarious Bruce Lawson if there was an open bug, but he is constrained from commenting on their roadmap.)
Adobe maintain a handy support matrix for easy reference.
Hackcough "Polyfilling"?
It would be difficult achieve a similar effect using JavaScript, and even more difficult to do it efficiently. I can think of two very naive approaches to make room for an absolutely positioned element in a region:
"block out" space for element using strategically-inserted inline spans; or
surround each word with a span element, and style each word individually to make room for the excluded element using padding.
I've hacked up a very broken demo of how the second approach might work. It's horrible, buggy and easy to break. I actually spent a few weeks after answering this question working on a polyfill for the Exclusions spec, but gave up because there were too many bugs and performance issues.
You will have myriad issues with either approach: columns, text alignment, errant child elements (especially floated or positioned elements!), various edge conditions, horrible things if you change the HTML, hyphenation—merciful heavens, I don't even want to think about hyphenation—and, of course, potentially magnificent performance issues after taking account of these things.
Performance issues can be ameliorated somewhat; for example, I've used elementFromPoint to try and get the span containing the first overlapping word directly, and some browsers even support caretPositionFromPoint, which may also help. I think that with a lot of work, you could make something that works pretty well for static content; but making it fast enough that you can drag it around with the mouse? My demo page has precious little content and doesn't address any of the mind-bendingly complex issues you'd have to deal with to make this work on real web pages. Even if you can get around all of those issues, making it fast enough to drag around smoothly would be very challenging.
* I strongly hope vendors will implement CSS Exclusions. People have been asking for these features since the earliest days of CSS, and it is a common and legitimate visual design objective both on screen and in print.
This is possible in IE10, using positioned floats: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/HTML5/PositionedFloats/Default.html
Other browsers have yet to support this.
Well, at least for the wrapping, if you want to use jQuery, you can use this jQSlickWrap plugin to have the text wrap around the irregularly-shaped image. It uses a nice HTML5 canvas technique.
See the text wrap example here: http://www.jwf.us/projects/jQSlickWrap/example2.html
Hope it helps!
I dont know whether I am reiventing the wheel.
I need to design an online WYSIWYG where users can make one/two/three-column layout page.The WYSIWYG should adjactly show the contents in design mode as well as preview mode.Therefore, the WYSIWYG should also have the supports for Header and Footer too.Therefore, the WYSIWYG will have at least three boxes(Header, Content,Footer) and in max it may contain six boxes.
IFRAME supports designmode (on/off) and it has content editable property and it also supported by most browsers. Though DIV also has the content editable properly in the latest browsers. Since there are many users who use IE6 still, probably choosing IFRAME is better(need your kind advice).
Now the question is whether I should use 6 IFrames or only one Ifrmae or no Iframe at all? Please suggest.
Thanks.
It sounds to me like you are trying to reinvent the wheel. You should be able to use one of the existing WYSIWYG editors with template support built-in. So I'd suggest you have a look at CKEditor, which probably has all the features you need.
Choose whatever existing editor that you like, but don't try to recreate one yourself, you'll become crazy.
I don't even know what do you understand as different between WYSIWYG and "Rich Text Editor", the main difference might be that no web-based editor can be really "What You Get", because there are lots of little problems.
Anyway, it seems that you want to create a page with one toolbar and several editing instances, I think that all the main editors does support that, but I would avoid using one based on a framework (YUI or Google closure) unless you are already using that framework.
Check instead the features of stand alone editors like CKEditor or TinyMCE. You'll hardly get anything better that those ones.
Don't reinvent the wheel! If you decide that you need to support designmode iframes as well as contenteditable, Google Closure Editor has a very performant implementation of multiple editing surfaces that only creates one iframe at a time.
I would look at YUI Editor from Yahoo, The YUI stuff does support a drag and drop column editing. I would say reuse in this case.
EDIT: Since you say you want to edit multiple areas per page you should also check out the YUI Editor's Multi edit example page
by simple I mean, having buttons:
bold,
italic,
numbered list
bullet point list
indent left
indent right
spell check (obviously supported by ready made js component)
by custom I mean: having custom icons - so really just custom design
no frameworks, written from scratch, lightweight, compatible with major browsers
this is one of the main components of the webapp, so it has to be super lightweight, that's why I don't want frameworks
Unless you are targeting one browser, editors are immensely complicated components to get to work cross browser. There's no reason to do it yourself, unless you want to learn.
Use one of the many available that allow customization:
tinymce,
fckeditor,
wysihat,
others
Writing an editor that works cross-platform can be difficult, but, you should create your own framework as you do it, as it is a large project.
If you just want custom icons, that will depend on how long it takes you to make them, but, to get some basic functionality isn't that hard, probably less than 40 hrs of work if you know what you are doing.
In Unix writing your own shell used to be a rite of passage, in javascript it may be writing your own editor. :)
Where it gets tricky is if I have
<b>some text</b><i>more text</i>
and I decide to remove the tags from this text, then how to fix it will get tricky.
If you want to use only css then it gets to be more of a problem as you are grouping text from span tags, and fixing css classes, while the user is continuing to make changes.
I am dealing with this currently as I want an editor that works in XHTML2.0, and it is not a trivial issue, much harder than it is to do in a desktop application.
I would suggest getting it to work on Firefox 3 and Safari first, then, once it is working, go back and add in the code to get it to work on IE8, and if you want IE7, since MS is pushing IE8 out as a critical update now.
Don't.
Go get something else (any of those Jason mentioned, or e.g. what SO itself uses, WMD). Swap out its images. The end.
Seriously you don't want to write your own editor unless you have a very good reason for it functionally, not just what it looks like.
Read through the first chapters of the emacs tutorial, and you will see that there is not anything like a "simple" editor. But google will give you lots of easy customizable editors.
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Closed 10 years ago.
While developing for multiple sets of browsers, what issues have you faced while development due to differences in browser implementation?
To start with I am listing some of those which i faced:
A text node in Firefox allows only 4K data. So an XML Ajax response gets split up into multiple text child nodes instead of only one node. Its fine in Internet Explorer. For Firefox, to get the full data you either need to use node.normalize before you call node.firstChild or use node.textContent, both of which are Mozilla specific methods
Internet Explorer does not replace or HTML char code 160, you need to replace its Unicode equivalent \u00a0
In Firefox a dynamically created input field inside a form (created using document.createElement) does not pass its value on form submit.
document.getElementById in Internet Explorer will return an element even if the element name matches. Mozilla only returns element if id matches.
In Internet Explorer if a select box has a value not represented by any of the options, it will display blank, Firefox displays the first option.
The only one that really gets to me:
IE6 is still used by ~18% of the web -- that's nearly 1 in 5 -- and addressing its issues is time consuming, hackish, and frustrating. ;) The issues are really too numerous to list here.
If you're interested in the issues themselves, QuirksMode.org is an amazing resource I used every day before making the leap to client-side libraries. Also check out John Resig's The DOM is a Mess presentation at yahoo, which gives a lot of theory about how to deal with cross-browser topics efficiently.
However, if you're interested in simply having them solved, your question is an excellent example of why many consider using client-side libraries like jQuery, YahooUI, MooTools, Dojo, etc. With a thriving community, talented people and corporate backing projects like those allow you to focus on your app rather than these issues.
Here are some jQuery examples that avoid much of the cross-browser frustration and can really make all of this.. fun.
Cross-browser mouse click binding
$('#select anything + you[want=using] ~ css:selectors').click(
function(){
alert('hi');
}
);
Cross-browser HTML Injection
$('#anElementWithThisId').html('<span>anything you want</span>');
Cross-browser Ajax (all request objects are still made available to you)
$('p.message').load('/folder/file.html');
And what really blows me away, load a data subset with selectors (see manual for details)
$('p.message').load('/folder/file.html body p:first-child');
Now, how all this really starts to get fun: chaining methods together
$('ul.menu a').click( // bind click event to all matched objects
function(evt){ // stnd event object is the first parameter
evt.preventDefault(); // method is cross-browser thx to jquery
$(this) // this = the clicked 'a' tag, like raw js
.addClass('selected') // add a 'selected' css class to it
.closest('ul.menu') // climb the dom tree back up to the ul
.find('a.selected') // find any existing selected dom children
.not(this) // filter out this element from matches
.removeClass('selected'); // remove 'selected' css class
}
)
Reminds me of Joel's Can Your Programming Language Do This? article.
Taking all this to a theoretical level, true advancement doesn't come from what you can do with conscious thought and effort, but rather what you can do automatically (without thought or effort). Joel has a segment on this in Smart And Gets Things Done regarding interviewing questions and smart developers, completely changed my approach to programming.
Similar to a pianist who can just 'play' the music because she knows all the keys, your advancement comes not from doing more things that require thought but rather more things that require no thought. The goal then becomes making all the basics easy.. natural.. subconscious.. so we can all geek out on our higher level goals.
Client side libraries, in a way, help us do just that. ;)
Most of the problems I have are with IE, specifically IE6. Problems I personally deal with that have left a memorable impression (in no particular order):
Having to use frameworks to do basic things because each browser implements the DOM a little differently. This is especially heinous with IE and AJAX, which necessitates multiple if-blocks just to get the call started. In an ideal world I'd be able to work in JavaScript without the framework to do basic things.
onChange on selects in IE are implemented wrong, and fire before the select loses focus (which is incorrect). This means you can never use onChange with selects due to IE, since keyboard-only users will be crippled by this implementation issue.
You mentioned it in your post, but it's a huge pain when IE grabs an element by name when using getElementById().
When in an RTL locale (Arabic, Hebrew, etc.), Firefox implements "text-align: right;" incorrectly. If the container overflows for some reason, the text aligns to the right side of the viewable container, rather than the right side of the container itself (even if it makes part of it invisible).
Different browsers have differing levels of pickiness with regards to how you end arrays and objects. For example, Firefox is more than okay with an array looking like this: [ item0, item1, ]". However, this same code will make Opera barf because it hates the trailing comma. IE will make the array a three-item array, with the third item undefined! This is bad code for sure, but there's been dynamically generated javascript I've worked on that was a huge pain to rewrite - would've been nice if this just worked.
Everything having to do with IE's hasLayout. So much awful pain has revolved around this attribute, especially when I didn't know it existed. So many problems fixed by using hacks to add hasLayout. So many more problems created as a result of the hacks.
Floats in IE rarely work the way you hope they do. They also tend to be annoying in other browsers, but they at least conform to a particular behavior. ;)
IE adding extra white space between list items has caused me no end of pain, since YUI uses lists to make their menus. (To fully grasp the issue, you have to view that link in IE and another browser side by side.)
I have lots of issues getting text not to wrap in containers in IE. Other browsers listen to "white-space: nowrap" a lot better. This has been a problem with a UI I worked on that has a resizable sidebar; in IE, the sidebar items will start to wrap if you resize it too much.
The lack of many CSS selector types in IE6 means you have to class-up your DOM more than necessary. For example, the lack of +, :hover, :first-child.
Different browsers treat empty text nodes differently. Specifically, when traversing the DOM with Opera, I have to worry about empty text nodes when browsing a node's children. This isn't a problem if you're looking for a particular item, but it is if you're writing code that expects a particular input and the way the browser views that input differs.
In IE6, when you dynamically generate an iframe via javascript, the iframe sometimes doesn't fill its container automatically (even with width and height set to max). I still don't know how to solve this issue, and have been thinking of posting a question about it.
In IE, you can't set overflow CSS on the <tbody> element. This means that scrollable tables (with a concrete <thead> and <tfoot>) are impossible to make in a simple manner.
I will probably add more to this list later, since (to me) the worst part of web development are cross-browser issues. Also, I doubt I'll ever edit out the "I will probably add more to this list later", since these problems are endless. :)
IE6? Meh. You guys have got it easy! You've never had to make CSS layout work in Netscape 4 (without crashing the entire browser)? You've never had to write for appliance browsers that don't support tables? You've never had to write for IE Mobile?
there is no support for JavaScript-assigned event handlers; you can only write an event handler through setting “onclick="somestring"” in innerHTML;
most basic DOM Level 1 properties (eg. nodeName, nodeType, nodeValue, firstChild, lastChild, nextSibling, previousSibling, data, value, HTMLElement.getElementsByTagName, all HTMLTableElement members, most CSSStyleDeclaration members) simply do not exist;
most CSS layout properties do not work; many simply CSS properties like ‘width’ don't work on some elements such as form fields;
setting many other CSS properties on elements like tables and form fields causes an instant browser hang, which, since Windows Mobile has no built-in task manager, means you have to soft-reset the device;
oh, and putting anything but text inside a <button> is insta-crash too;
huge chunks of basic JavaScript methods and “DOM Level 0” methods going back as far as Netscape 2 (!) are missing.
And this is the most up-to-date release of Microsoft's flagship Windows Mobile browser in 2009.
Sure, it supports XMLHttpRequest, but writing AJAX code on a browser whose CSS and script support is less than IE3 (!) is bizarrely schizophrenic, like you're working with a weird amalgam of 21st-century and 19th-century technologies.
I wouldn't recommend it.
Been doing this too long to have many problems, but it still drives me nuts that I have to hack around IE's non-support for CSS things like display:table, :last-child, and :hover outside of anchors.
All the IE stuff is still insane, but it's just background insanity now :)
Biggest Cross-Browser Issue? - Internet Explorer!
<start_grumpy>
IE is solely responsible for "holding back the web" - us developers can't create amazing sites using HTML5, or SVG, or XFORMS, or CANVAS... not because of Firefox,Safari or Chrome, but because 2/3s of the Internet is still stuck on IE. Not to mention that ~20% of the web is still stuck on IE6! IE8 is the first version of IE to at least try to be standards compatible (2001's standards that is), which means it will be at least 2018 before we can finally start dropping all support for IE7.
</start_grumpy>
Otherwise name a DOM method that IE fully supports... the fact that this is a hard question to answer is my biggest CrossBrowser issue.
getElementById() - badly broken
getElementsByName() - buggy
getElementsByTagName() - buggy
getAttribute() - buggy
setAttribute() - majorly broken
createElement() - buggy
appendChild() - buggy
even things IE invented are messed up...
innerHTML (getting) - returns the worst markup possible
innerHTML (setting) - doesn't work on the elements you'd want to dump a bunch of data into (e.g. Tables and Selects)
While developing a system tests framework for a web app we had to simulate various events such as clicks. I remember that we couldn't find any normal way to do it in IE and FF and had to implement it in two different ways with a lot of voodoo around.
I don't remember the specifics, but I remember that it was really annoying.
This, basically.
Modern javascript frameworks (jQuery, prototype, etc) have done wonders for getting code working in lots of browsers at once.
The biggest problem I have now is the fact that any sort of rich UI behaviour runs amazingly slowly. IE7 is bad. IE6 is worse. IE8 is buggy, half finished, and really no better than IE7.
The worst thing is that I don't think we'll ever be free of IE6. It was so ubiquitous, and so damn quirky. Loads of 'enterprise' (and by that I mean big web apps made by one big company for another big company) applications used highly specific IE6 javascript that doesn't even work in IE7, never mind anything else.
Companies can't afford to completely replace these apps - we're trying to sell them new ones and that means IE6 support is mandatory. The way it is right now, with credit-crunched companies cutting costs, I reckon we'll still be supporting IE6 in 2015 :-(
In internet explorer (note: older versions of IE, not necessarily versions 9/10+), if you create form elements using document.createElement, the field won't be submitted with the form. The only workaround is to use
element.innerHTML = "<input type='text' value="+val+" name="+name+">";
In IE, you can not hide select option elements, only the select element itself. This makes it difficult to dynamically change the contents of select options using Javascript.
This problem also exists in Safari and Chrome.
There are many other issues with IE, but this one has caused me the most frustration recently.
IE's restrictions on using DOM manipulations on tables forced me to take a completely different approach to something. Very frustrating at the start, but the positive out of it was that the second approach was ultimately better, so I suppose I should be grateful to IE. ;)
For Firefox, to get the full data you either need to use node.normalize before you call node.firstChild or use node.textContent, both of which are Mozilla specific methods
Actually all of those are W3C DOM methods supported by the vast majority of browsers. I think you'll find they also work in IE.
My biggest cross-browser issue is that there are people out there still using IE.
Second biggest is that even in standards-following browsers, doing some things in CSS is still impossible; for instance tbody {overflow:auto} does nothing useful in anything but Gecko, and even there it has bugs.
Firefox and IE ahve different table setups in the DOM, in one, all siblings of a cell are the other cells, whilst the other has elements between the cells. I can't remember which way around it is, but it gave me a real headache in one application.
My biggest problem are browser makers. Arrogant little *^&%s. I mean, you can't sell a browser to anybody, yet everyone is in their little corner trying to out do each other, only creating division. Oh and Chrome. Chrome still doesn't know what it wants to be, Safari or Firefox. Aside from its one parlor trick, its practically useless. I blame all you guys who kept googling just because you hate monopolies. Guess what, they're the monopoly now. Now we can all enjoy second rate, prematurely launched software.
This mostly stems from a bug* I had in Chrome today, it never dawned on me to query the browser. Both Safari and Chrome were failing so I figured hey, once I fixed the Safari problem Chrome would be fixed automatically, but oh no no. Mr."I run tabs in seperate processes" AKA "Sr. No full screen" just had to hold me in the lizard lock with its mind boggling implementation.
I also detest Firefox. I can't tell whether I have a virus infestation or Firebug running. Now until Adobe decides to release a browser that makes Flash practical for things other than movie clips I'm pretty much going to have something to bitch about for a long time. And we all know that's what life is all about.
Also, I only enjoy programming when I encounter ridiculous bugs that make my brain juices run.
Inconsistencies in the CSS box model when dealing with forms. In particular it's irritating how each browser handles the <select> Box
my only nightmare is IE6 you should always look for hacks but everytime you face a problem with it there is someone who ran into it before you and blogged about it (and we will never get away from it )
I was working on CSS layout written by someone who thought that the size given to an element is size+padding+border like in IE5 and not only the content box as explained in official specification. It was written only a few month ago so he did dirty hacks to make it look well in IE7. It took me several hours with FireBug to track down the source of the problem and by the time I realized it I was really annoyed.
If you open site with "floating" CSS written for IE5 in Firefox the boxes just do not have enough space to fit and fall down the page. If you open it in IE7 it looks nice as IE7 lets the borders overlap so it looks almost correct. For someone as inexperienced as me it was hard to note.
To remove iframe borders in Internet Explorer you have to specify the frameborder attribute as camelCase format, which is non xhtml compliant.
<iframe frameBorder="0"/>
An easy way to help with the pesky IE display issues is to use firebug, Yep enen in IE 6/7/8 Just use Firebug Lite
If you add the following as a bookmark and stick it on your tool bar it will enable firebug lite off any webpage with a single click. (only check this in IE and it works fine.)
javascript:var%20firebug=document.createElement('script');firebug.setAttribute('src','http://getfirebug.com/releases/lite/1.2/firebug-lite-compressed.js');document.body.appendChild(firebug);(function(){if(window.firebug.version){firebug.init();}else{setTimeout(arguments.callee);}})();void(firebug);