[cumbria_lug] UserGroup...

[Russ Phillips]

On Wednesday 21 Apr 2004 20:22, Schwuk wrote:

> Formatting of the articles has also concerned me - allowing full HTML
> access can cause problems, but using other markups (like phpBB's BBCode
> and Textile - http://textism.com/tools/textile/ ) can make things
> awkward for the users. Supporting something like Mozilla's Midas (
> http://www.mozilla.org/editor/midasdemo/ ) might help here.

Midas looks interesting - I'd not seen it before. However, it looks like it 
will only work on Gecko-based browsers. Is that right? Some time ago, I was 
looking at similar things on SourceForge.net, but they all required IE. If 
Midas is Gecko-only, I'd suggest having browser detection, and switching to 
Midas or an IE equivalent if the browser is Gecko-based or IE. If it's 
neither, you could downgrade to a simple text box. Not very nice/pretty, but 
better than nothing.

If you allow users to enter raw HTML code, then you get into problems with 
keeping everything valid. Midas looked like it generated correct HTML, but 
what if a user decided to enter <b><i><u>Some crap</b></i></u> in the middle? 
Would it get submitted that way, or would Midas encode the text before 
submission?

You could validate the HTML before allowing it to be submitted (possibly 
putting suspect code into an area where an admin could check it before 
allowing it). The source code for the W3C's validator is available (http://
validator.w3.org/source/), or you could just check for some common errors.

Just my 2p.

Russ

-- 
"If people know what we're doing, they know what we're doing wrong"
(Yes Minister)