Help poke at the new RTE for the beta update page!

[denise]

wohali has been working on issue 664 to add a RTE to the new beta update page, and is ready for more eyeballs to poke at it and try to hit weird/unusual use cases or things that could be improved!

If you have a few, please poke at the new RTE on wohali's dreamhack. To test it:

* Go to http://www.wohali.hack.dreamwidth.net/ and create an account.
* Go to http://www.wohali.hack.dreamwidth.net/beta to turn on the beta update page and http://www.wohali.hack.dreamwidth.net/update to make a post with it.

The update page should default to RTE on the beta update page. To disable it, go to Settings and check "Completely disable the Rich Text Editor (use plain textarea only)". (Historically speaking, a lot of RTE glitches happened when switching from HTML mode to RTE mode, so it's probably worth testing that a bunch.) Accessibility help is available by pressing Alt+0 (zero) while the editor is focused.

If you run into a problem or want to give feedback, you can comment on this entry. If reporting a problem, please include a link to the entry you made so wohali can see the markup!

Comments

[swaldman]

Re the first half: Yes, I understand that, and that's why I don't think we can reach what I'd consider to be a good solution while supporting the single-newline-means-linebreak feature[1]. That feature forces you to have the page do user-unfriendly things, such as resetting that check box every time.

Re second half: Damn, I didn't realise that the old system did it at display time rather than submit time. That's awkward :-/ With that said, if we could find a way to make things work right within the RTE, I don't actually see a reason *not* to just add br tags at submit time and never set the backend newline-to-br bit again...
(editing old posts might be awkward, I guess. And there are probably other gotchas that I haven't thought of :-/)

Once again, your work on this is appreciated, and I'm sorry for bringing up problems!



[1] Please bear in mind that I have absolutely no authority around here; I just talk a lot. Just because I don't like soimething doesn't mean that it isn't acceptable to the powers that be!

[swaldman]

Radical idea: if we have to keep single-newline-means-linebreak, then we don't offer that in conjunction with the RTE. Remove that option from the RTE and add the checkbox, working as it used to in setting a database flag, to the form that is shown if the "disable RTE completely" option is selected. If you want to use the "auto-format" thing, you don't get to use the RTE on the same post.

This does arguably mean removing a feature. I don't know how many used the newline-to-br functionality and round-tripped things in the old RTE. But it's another way to proceed without requiring user-unfriendly kludge. I don't think there's a way to make this work that won't make somebody unhappy...

Now I'm feeling that I'm the only voice on this issue, so I'm going to shut up for a while, and hope that others have opinions.....

[pinterface]

To use a colloquialism, I don't really have a dog in this fight, but: removing the auto-format checkbox when the RTE loads seems like a pretty reasonable compromise. The newlines-to-br functionality is basically a really low-grade RTE, so when there's a not-terrible RTE available it seems reasonable to let it subsume the functionality of the less-good one.