Over the last couple of months I've become very passionate about WYSIWYG HTML editors. Mostly because I was forced to use a really bad HTML WYSIWYG editor called Sharepoint Out-of-the-box editor. I actually ended up just editing most of the stuff in plain HTML, which is though not the point of having a HTML WYSIWYG editor. A good WYSIWYG editor will produce clean HTML markup and will make the writer much faster in producing nicely formatted output.
WYSIWYG – A short introduction – For all newbies. What is WYSIWYG.
WYSIWYG Editors Are Evil – Advantages Of Clean Content Markup – Why would you care about the editor?
Let's have a look at 6 HTML WYSIWYG editors for the web:
CKEditor
CKEditor is an open source HTML WYSIWYG editor that is also available with a commercial licence. It's very popular and provides an integration for Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 & 2007. A lot of open source CMS' like Drupal, WordPress, Typo3 provide modules or plugins to integrate the CKEditor. CKEditor is an opensource project. It's free.
NicEdit
NicEdit is a Lightweight, Cross Platform, HTML Editor to allow easy editing of web site content on the fly in the browser. NicEdit Javascript integrates into any site in seconds to make any element/div editable or convert standard textareas to rich text editing.
TinyMCE
Very similar to CKeditor. WordPress uses it out of the box. Nice and powerful yet fast editor and also freely available.
RealObject edit-on NG
This editor is Java based. It looks very powerful. Since is Java based it though takes some time loading everything. Can't compare to CKEditor for example. edit-on NG is not open source. Licenses are pretty expensive (3000 $).
openwysiwyg
From the look and feel just like the CKEditor, but no support for Chrome! So this is a no go!
Xinha
Never heard of that one before. Here's what the website says: "Xinha is a powerful WYSIWYG HTML editor component that works in all current browsers. Its configurabilty and extensibility make it easy to build just the right editor for multiple purposes, from a restricted mini-editor for one database field to a full-fledged website editor." It seems though dead: Last update was in May 2010