Programerov Blog

No version of Opera supports rich text editing and therefore, Opera users are missing out.

Opera developers have said that they are aware of how much Opera users are missing out, but they clearly state that it took a long time for Microsoft and the Mozilla Foundation to implement rich text editing and even longer to work the bugs out. Safari 2 suposedly will have rich text editing support, which means Konqueror most likely wil get it too. From reading, the Safari team worked long and hard to get initial support in Safari 2.

Another problem raised is, What implementation do we use?. Should Opera create their own implementation, for rich text editing or should they attempt to use an existing one.

However, Opera developers are currently concentrating on getting the basics of manipulating text in a textarea and providing some basic DOM support that rich text editors rely on. In 8 beta 1, you can see some of their efforts by looking at the document.range test, treewalker test and node iterator test. document.getSelection support is actually close to working properly now , but it is not yet complete. Basically, you have to have the basics first.

Priority is another concern. Although many feel rich text editing needs to be added now, bugs and any missing standards support needs to be added first. Rich text editing is not a standard and is probably one of the reasons it gets less priority.

Another problem is iframe security. If Opera is going to support some type of iframe overlay for WYSIWYG editing, the iframe is most likely going to need to be writable. Currently Opera’s iframe security is so tight that you cannot modify its contents like you can in other browsers; not even if the iframe is on the same domain as its parent frame/page. That means dom methods like appendChild are broken in Opera when it comes to iframes. Because of this, authors are forced to use write() or data URIs to more or less write a new page to the iframe. Using write() and data URIs is a decent workaround, for writing to an iframe, but they won’t be enough when it comes to WYSIWYG editing. (If an iframe overlay is used)

So what do we Opera users do?

We wait patiently!

However, don’t forget that Java and Flash can provide rich text editing, which can be far more universal. I just haven’t seen any that do as good as HTMLarea or the like. Plus, Java applets and Flash usually use more resources than javascript-based rich text editors.

There is a Flash-based WYWIWYG editor that shows promise. This might be the only hope for rich text editing in Opera for a while.

If we get the support, what else can we expect?

First off, a lot of people are going to be happy that they don’t have to fire up a different browser to do WYSIWYG editing. However, every browser requires slightly different javascript to load the editor and Opera will probably be the same way. That means that current editors will have to be modified to support Opera before people can actually enjoy the rich text editing support.