I am aware that Javascript WYSIWYG editors use the inbuilt editor mode of the browser to function, but that comes up with various problems and issues.
Can an editor be built from scratch in JS, something like what Buzzword people have done with flash/flex? I came across this blog post recently and I am just wondering if this can be built (atleast to a moderate extent) using Javascript?
It depends what you mean by "from scratch". Google Docs provides a pretty good text editor in JS. Is that what you mean ?
Of course you can do it and it is not very difficult.
But before reinventing the wheel please take a look at all the existing ones.
Many of them are really very well written and open source.
Almost anything can be done with JavaScript. You have the basic building tools right there - you can intercept all mouse events and nearly all keyboard events. You can use a GIF animation for simulating the caret. The trickier part might be measuring the size of text so that you can position your caret where you need to. I'm not exactly sure how you could do that. But if you figure that out, the rest is doable. Although it will really require tons of wheel-reinventing code.
Reminds me of a little experiment I did sometime back... I basically tried to create a primitive editor by simply listening to keypresses on a DIV and to insert them into the DIV as a new node. So imagine, each character would be wrapped in a tag! It actually worked. But, once it reaches a couple of paragraphs, node insertion and deletion becomes rather slow. You will type a character, and it would only appear after a slight delay, and this simply unacceptable, and eventually I just gave up. Anyway it was just a random thing I wanted to try out..
Coming back to your question, I wonder if this can be replicated in JS alone as frankly the flash has superior raw processing power compared to JS. Even if it's technically feasible, I doubt whether it will be fast enough to actually work well. My two cents!
Atwood's Law:
Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be
written in JavaScript.
Related
In the Visual Event description, it says that it extracts "which elements have events attached to them". I can confirm this by running the bookmarklet and seeing all the colour highlights.
I would like to extract this information without the fancy presentation so that I can play around with it into a script (Ruby/Python/Perl). In other words, I would like to get a list of the divs (and their info ideally) from Visual Event.
Is there any way to do this without digging through the code on GitHub? Not to say that I'm not willing to do this, I was just wondering if there was an easier way.
There is no way to accomplish this very oddly specific task without digging through the code, although this isn't as hard as it seems considering it's quite legible and easy to build on your own system, even if you don't have any previous experience with JavaScript.
Before I started to try and make this thing, I wanted to know if it is possible, under the following circumstances:
The code to script up that math must be able to be taken, submitted and stored in a database
The code for two pieces of math which look exactly the same must have the exact same code
According to the requirements, wherever the user clicks his or her mouse, the caret must move to that specific element or part of the math
So, is it possible? I'm looking forward to using technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, and even Flash as a last resort.
MathQuill lets you type maths in a WYSIWYG fashion, source here.
There is a demo on the homepage.
I think you want something like MathML. Take a look here. http://www.w3.org/Math/
or maybe http://code.google.com/p/mathmleditor/
I found this a while ago http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php pretty useful implementation of LaTeX with a live preview, I've used it a few times. Probably doesn't fit the bill for your point 3 either but just in case it is useful.
I am trying to find some example code using a javascript library for a force directed graph in which the user can move any node around (and the graph responds dynamically) - but then each node can be clickable and open an "node detail" page (in a different tab).
I looked through D3.js, arbor.js, jit (javascript infoviz toolkit), springy. Those all look great and have demos which are close to what I want, but not quite there.
I'm not an experienced js programmer, I mostly do server side stuff.
My fear is that I might try to learn one of these libraries to try and implement my use-case only to find that it won't work for some reason. For example, one of these (D3) has a discussion in its forum that clicking a node is often mistaken for moving the node and there didn't seem to be a quick workaround. In another one (arbor.js), the front page (in addition to being minified) shows something close to what I want but the nodes which are movable are not clickable and the nodes which are clickable are not movable.
FF or Chrome is fine - I don't need IE support.
I am also open to something Flash based - as long as I don't need to compile anything in Actionscript/Flash - something with a js/html API.
Thanks.
I think that's a pretty good list of tools you have. Protovis?
I suspect it's actually not going to be much work to grab a click event from any JS-based tool-- but I haven't done that specifically with any of the ones you mention.
A couple years ago I did a prototype project using a pure Javascript implementation. Everything is just DOM nodes, so you can definitely grab clicks as necessary. It's fine, but since the code is not actively maintained (as far as I could find), I did have to do quite a bit to fit it to my needs. Using something with more recent and active development is a good idea. I also learned that performance was going to be an issue, especially in Firefox. You can play with my prototype and see where it breaks down-- which it does. I think 100 nodes or so is the danger point.
Good luck!
If you access your mobile me account online with Safari, you can select an icon and login directly to selected service, great feature btw.
But if you access the same page using other browser like firefox or Chrome, you will see a gorgeous login page with a big, no huge cloud in the middle (the MobileMe logo) and interesting lighballs comming out of it.
Here's the link:
https://auth.me.com/authenticate?service=mail&ssoNamespace=appleid&formID=loginForm&returnURL=aHR0cHM6Ly9tZS5jb20vbWFpbC8=
And the greatest thing is that you can mouse over those little light balls and they follow your mouse movement.
Its just beautiful and i have never seen anything like that in Javascript. And i couldnt understand by looking at their code, how they did it. Of course their javascript is compressed so i couldn't look at it, but in the markup those shiny lights are just a bunch of canvas tags.
Does any one have an idea of how to make something like that? Its probably way beyond my javascript skills but it would be great to add such an effect to one of my projects.
Thanks in advance for all your suggestions ;)
that takes a lot of skills. I believe its achievable with processing.js
http://processingjs.org/
Take a look at this [quote]:
So, how is this eye candy accomplished? Through over 6000 lines of
(unminified) JS. MobileMe usually uses SproutCore for its
applications, but after looking through the source code, I didn’t find
a single reference to it. There did appear to be some resemblance of
a library being used in the login page, however, but I think it is
pretty custom. There appeared to be a class for each of the visual
components on the screen, at least one if not two separate animation
libraries (one 2d and one 3d), a particle rendering library, and
libraries for dealing with canvas drawing and DOM manipulation.
So it looks like it was custom made. You can read more here: http://badassjs.com/post/1649735994/the-new-mobileme-login-page-has-some-badass-js
I hope this helps.
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.