Planning the most useful WYSIWYG editor (for me).

1. Why?!

1. because i can't even remember the markup for my own wiki any more!!
2. because i have to work around limitations of my own blog's bbcode.
3. i want one editor/markup powering my forum, blog and wiki.

2. What are the requirements?

• Only limited feature set - Only features that work and make sense - no user should select the font! select the type of style you want to use, but not how it should look like (yeah, very CMSie)
• The features that work .. must work. always. in every current browser (= IE >=7, Firefox >= 3.5, Google Chrome, latest Safari)
• Extensible (Should at least be usable for the Wiki and the Forum.
• Support for attaching files and images - and include images. (images with zoom features, server side resizing, etc.)

3. Not to haves

It is always more important to define what should NOT be supported.

• backward compatibility (i would deprecate all previous markup renderers.)

4. How to get there

• Define feature set
• implement server-side features (XHTML rendering)
• integrate, customize and extend tinymce
• integrate the editor into the forum
• integrate the editor into the blog (should be the same as for the forum?)
• integrate the editor into the wiki

5. Implementation Details

The basic markup should be a subset of (x)html - valid XML is the easiest to parse. there are enough libraries and utilities out there for python. so this should be the way to go.

Custom features can be added by using custom attributes or simply assert custom functionality. For example: < img src="..." imgid="123" width="500px" height="200px" /> should generate a thumbnail of the file with id 123 with width 500 and height 200 px. (the src="..." is ignored - it is only needed so tinymce can display a valid image while editing.). - Maybe we could use custom namespaces? < img src="..." sph:imgid="123" ... / >?