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Ben Nadel at the ColdFusion Centaur And Bolt User Group Tour (Jun. 2009) with: Ben Forta and Alison Huselid and Adam Lehman
Ben Nadel at the ColdFusion Centaur And Bolt User Group Tour (Jun. 2009) with: Ben Forta ( @benforta ) Alison Huselid Adam Lehman ( @adrocknaphobia )

Great XHtml Editor, Even Better Support Team

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I just want to give props to the support team at XStandard. As you might know, I think that XStandard is the best XHtml WYSIWYG editor around. I also think that the XStandard support team is amazing. No matter what problem I have, they have the solution. And more often then not, they have answers for you within a few hours. I can't even get responsiveness like that from some of the people sitting next to me.

Reader Comments

172 Comments

Hear hear. I use XStandard with several CMSes. Great support responsiveness: yes. Best XHTML WYSIWYG out there: quite possibly. Still, I would be much happier if they came out with a JavaScript-based implementation which had all or most of the same features. The JavaScript WYSIWYGs out there today are somewhat weak. I'm hoping that Yahoo!'s YUI team eventually releases a WYSIWYG, as I imagine they'd hold it to a standard which would blow away the competition (not necessarily XStandard, but other JavaScript editors out there).

15,674 Comments

Steve,

A Javascript implementation would awesome. A lot of people don't like the fact that it's an ActiveX object. Some people even say that's a security risk, which I don't understand (it's only used by a few people in a system usually). But it is clearly the best WYSIWYG editor I have used.

6 Comments

It is bad that the software isn't available as Linux application. Otherwise I'd try it right now.

On the other hand I prefer coding from scratch... It sometimes needs updates and additions because it doesn't look eye-catching, however it's "hand-made" :) . I remember times when I used Microsoft (I am not using Win OS any more) Word for my first web pages. Just a thought, I am not comparing it to other WYSIWYG editors...

15,674 Comments

@Jan,

Certainly, every situation requires a unique solution. If XStandard is not right for you, not a problem. I think that the feature set that XStandard supplies far out weight the "cons" that come in my situations (eg. requires active-x plugin). But, certainly, it is NOT the best choice for every situation.

61 Comments

Hi Ben,

saw this old post of yours and thought I'd share my thoughts on the matter. I've been using XStandard since version 1.6 and recently upgraded to v2. Great tool, although it in the beginning cut out a lot of HTML-tags that it didn't recognize/know of. This made me swear and cuss quite a bit (and hack my HTML in the database), but ever since v2 this annoying habit hasn't reoccurred as support for all possible HTML-tags has increased. But, and that's a big but(t) (not on any of the nice females on your website though!), it's an Active-X component. That's very nice when it's installed on your local machine, but every time I'm on another computer I have to install the component (or plugin in Mozilla). And this prevents me from creating blog entries from anywhere in the world. I always need the component/plugin. And sometimes I'm on a computer that doesn't allow me to install anything.

So I do hope that XStandard will come up with a Javascript version that uses it's own rendering engine, so the code is guaranteed to be as XHTML 1.0 as it is now! Other than that it's by far the best WYSIWYG editor out there (FCKEditor comes close...)!

15,674 Comments

@Sebastiaan,

I understand exactly what you are saying. At the very least, I am thankful that FireFox doesn't actually require a full EXE install like Internet Explorer - it just automatically can add it as a plug-in. But still, it does mean you need to update no matter where you go.

I would be very excited if they came out with a Javascript implementation of the editor, but I am not even sure if that would be possible. There is so much logic that goes into it, especially the more advanced features and the XHTML compliance, like being able to lock part of the document down using CSS so that it is not editable or the drag-n-drop file uploads.

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Ben Nadel