The right column can be used for navigation links, search box etc.

When Google bought Blogger, they created a wonderful WYSIWYG control for creating weblog entries. They accomplished this by using a Microsoft DOM extension known as designMode which also happens to be implemented by Mozilla since version 1.3b (but not in other browsers).

In my thesis project i have the necessity to integrate a standard-compliant WYSIWYG editor for some tasks, so I went looking for an implementation that fit the bill:

• Be easy to add to a standard HTML form.
• Produce valid XHTML.
• Work cross browser (or at least in supported browsers).
• Use an open source license.

I found two projects that fit the bill, widgEditor and Javascript WYSIWYG HTML control.

Javascript WYSIWYG HTML control is a small, standards compliant, Javascript WYSIWYG HTML control written by Paul James. It currently works in Internet Explorer 5.5+ and Mozilla Gecko 1.3+ based browsers.

widgEditor is an easily installed, easily customisable WYSIWYG editor for simple content. It replaces existing textareas with an improved editing pane using JavaScript, therefore if you don't have JavaScript (or your browser doesn't support HTML editing) it degrades gracefully.

I have decided to use widgEditor and develop some extra ads, so this it's a work in progress and will continue to change.

Compose widgEditor <strong>automatically</strong> integrates the content that was in the textarea!