MemeCode - Blog

Rich Edit Progress

Date: 9/8/2005

Well, after a lot of poking around with HTML rich text controls I can say that it certainly wasn't the easy solution I was looking for. I've tried both the IE and Mozilla control and they both have show stopper issues.

IE

Delete key doesn't work.
Lots of weird duplicate p tags everywhere.

Mozilla

Layout of iframes can't be made to fill remaining space. 100% width and height are broken in that they get there dimensions off the body element instead of the parent div element. Meaning I can't resize the edit area to the client part of the window.
Bug #303829 means you can't implement popup dialogs in Mozilla.
No way of reliably calling javascript through the ActiveX interface. Meaning that to save the edited HTML back into a DOM accessable field you have to implement ugly hacks like retasking onmouseout to do the work for you and then programatically move the mouse out of the window.
It only works with the 11mb Mozilla ZIP release, not the installer version of Mozilla or Firefox or the Mozilla ActiveX installer. That sucks.
No way to get the size of the content without scrollbars to resize the window to fit everything in.

So I have a "kinda" working solution with the Mozilla control but it still sucks in some parts. So I'm not keen to release it on unsuspecting users.

I have learnt some cool new things though:

You can disable scroll bars on an element by using the style "overflow: hidden;"
There are special CSS colours that map to you current system colours. Very useful for creating UI elements that intergrate with the rest of an application.
At least in Mozilla an iframe with "display: hidden;" still appears as empty space in the layout of elements. If you use "display: none;" then you can't address it anymore, it kinda disappears. Sooooo what I did is "width:0px; height:0px" until I needed it and then set it's size with javascript when I needed it. But you do that like this:
```
ctrl.style.width = "100px";
ctrl.style.height = "80px";
```
instead of
```
ctrl.width = "100px";
ctrl.height = "80px";
```
shrug.

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