As a surprise and delight to many web developers, Safari 1.3 (released a few days ago via Software Update) includes WYSIWYG / RichText editing. This feature has been long rumored to be in the upcoming Mac OSX version Tiger. Although there appears to be no documentation, Safari’s developer Dave Hyatt reports that Safari is adapting Microsoft’s contentEditable including execCommand and designMode. So far no web developer has been able to get execCommand to work but contentEditable seems to work just fine. Hopefully there will be some documentation released soon on how to build Javascript interaction so that we can bring some sort of App like interaction.
Safari DEMO:This post is an example of WYSIWYG editing. Got Safari 1.3? Go ahead and DOUBLE CLICK ME (saving not allowed of course). You can try using Command+B or Command+I to make text bold or italic. also, you can drag the image around or even drag and drop an image from the browser or even your Desktop.
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@doug: “if you right click on a word it will google search the word. Great enhancements”
opera has been including this feature since version 6. no new enhancement, I’d say. plus: I can’t figure out the use of dragging pictures into a website (except it’s possible to upload them afterwards). strange mac-geekery… :-\
Hm. I see a lot of confusion about the usefulness of this. If you want to see an example, check out TYPO3 (or any other web-based CMS, for that matter). This is where you use a browser to create content, and having the ability to do this WYSIWYG is a nice thing.
Plus, you solve the issue of authentication with a login, if needed. :)
About dragging images into a browser window: Uploading things, exactly. You edit a text, and the image you want to appear with it is just dragged into the browser. Pretty nifty IMHO. BTW: IE supports things like that on Windows, too. And other browsers allow this type of drag’n'drop at least when using http://FTP...
Hope this answers some questions. ;)
Take care, Karsten
It’d be nice if we could get the likes of HTMLArea and FCKEditor working in Safari now! Does anyone know the situation on either of these WYSIWYG editors? currently Firefox seems to be the only mac browser they’ll work in…
Could this sort of thing be incorporated into Wikipedia?
nice
Cool. This will come in useful.
About time
I’ve put together a proof-of-concept on using execCommand with Safari 1.3+.
Click my name above to see it. I’ve only gotten it to work with the document object, but I’m sure some enterprising fellow can get it to work with textRanges and the like.
yes! this is great. it makes sense that it will work when triggered by another window. i’ve tried to tackle the issue of doing in in the same page without any success. tried it in the same div, in a separate div, in an inline frame but no worky. the problem seems to stem from loosing the current text selection when a button or link is clicked. any suggestions are welcomed.
For those of you looking for a WYSIWYG editor that works in Safari…
HTMLArea isn’t very actively developed, so you might as well scratch that one. Safari support doesn’t appear to be a priority yet for FCKEditor, either. I finally found this statement by their developer, Frederico Caldeira Knabben, dated April 20 in their forums: “I would be more than happy to promote the editor compatibility to Safari… I just still need to find out some way to have a Mac Mini here for testing it.”
The editor to keep your eye on is TinyMCE: They just bought a Mac Mini this week and Safari support is near the top of their to-do list!
We may not have to wait long, but don’t break out the champaign yet!
Scott Teresi