WYSIWYG

It's Friday, and that means it's time for the third project in my open source fortnight. This one is a simple WYSIWYG text style editor that uses contenteditable for its rendering.

The library allows you to apply basic styles, such as bold and italic to a contenteditable HTML element. You can then read the HTML straight from that element. It's written in CoffeeScript in a MVC 'controller' style and its only dependency is jQuery.

Content editable is a fickle beast, with an archaic API and poorly documented functionality. However in modern browsers, it does produce good HTML and is certainly a viable WYSIWYG solution.

I find the secret to creating WYSIWYGs (or software in general for that matter), is to keep things as simple as possible. That said, this library could certainly improve in a number of areas. For example:

1. Have a way of overriding the alert() notices
2. Show selected styles (this may be harder to do than I first anticipated)
3. Cross-browser keyboard shortcuts

In the spirit of open source fortnight I'm releasing it to the community. I'm excited to see where it goes next.