Introducing XStandard

Back in September I invited you, guys, to share your opinions on which HTML Rich Edit controls could handle a content management system (CMS) best. I appreciate all the valuable feedback I've received since that post. I did check out all components you brought to my attention. Of them all XStandard stood out of the crowd. Here's why...

Some Rich Edit controls don't degrade gracefully. Sorry, folks, but I don't consider displaying a multiline textbox of an arbitrary size a case of clean fallback. Neither am I buying into the "Best viewed with IE" mindset anymore.

The rest of the controls I evaluated get into the habit of giving too much styling freedom with strike-throughs, font faces and sizes, etc, which leads to... You guessed it—a <font> tag galore and such. You can pretty much forget about consistency once you let users drive the color and font picker. Forget about the carefully crafted color pallete you've picked and set via your CSS.

So What's The Story With XStandard?

With the advent of ver. 1.4 they support both IE and Mozilla equally well. Right now I'm writing this post in XStandard Lite in Firefox. I don't have to worry about validation because the control always produces valid XHTML. The output contains no messy color and font definitions or obsolete elements. The professional version contains a lot more neat features, such as cleanup of Microsoft Word, configurable toolbar, speel cheker, etc.

All this makes XStandard quite unique. You can say it's a content- rather that presentation-driven paradigm. In my opinion, if you want to sleep tight and not worry about someone screwing your CMS with a funky font in huge bold green letters you need to drive structure, not the looks. Style sheets will take care of the looks if you have properly formatted content in place.

By the way, this message is not sponsored by either Kerry or Bush campaign. I don't get paid for this. I just dig XStandard with two shovels (aka "like it very much").

Looks nice and loads fast. Haven't had much chance to play with it, but I like the syntax highlighting and code folding in the source code mode. A worthy replacement to what we currently use at work, FCKeditor. Although it doesn't seem to have an interface to upload you images.

I really like XStandard too, and wish I could use it for every client. I haven't seen it produce a single line of invalid code yet.
Now that it works in Mozilla as well as in IE, Mac support, even if just in Mozilla, would be extremely useful for me.

Looks like an outstanding replacement for FreeTextBox that I am currently using. However, the pricing model for the Pro version looks horrible. They are actually charging per user!

I wondered if this would enable me to drop my custom clean up that enables me to get decent XHTML.

Two negatives from my perspective.
1) It installs an OCX. I need .NET assemblies.
2) The per person licensing is unusable in my scenario.

Without checking deeply it seems to have some black box areas. I need to customise.

Thanks for the information.

What do you think about the open source Editor:
http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/

There is no Active X required. We testet XStandard in our company with Windows XP Service Pack 2 and it didn't work on any of our Computers. Tinymce needs no Active X, is easily customizable and runs in firefox (and therefore maybe also on Mac/Linux).