Userland's Jake Savin has been considering an HTML editor in Flash (here and here) and writes:
Why doesn't Macromedia get their heads out of their asses and come up with a really kick ass cross-platform browser-based WYSIWYG editor plugin? It needs to be really fast, do spell checking, send data via HTTP POST, and ideally be extensible using locally running native code.
There's a gigantic opportunity here, and Macromedia has the experience, the marketing power and the developers to make it happen. If their users are already this close, then the engineers inside Macromedia are certainly capable of fulfilling this wish.
This is a topic I went into some depth on back in June. I posted this comment to Jake weblog:
I had written about the illogicz (rich) text editor in my weblog that got the first discussion going sometime ago. Sadly little progress has been made in furthering this idea. Here is what I can offer this thread...
At a meeting with Macromedia I made the same suggestion as Jake -- develop a markup editor widget for the communities use. I was told that Macromedia would leave such an effort to its partners or the flash developer community at large. After several messages to the folks at illogicz I received a broadcast message thanking me for my interest and stating their intent to package the editor into a product that they would offer for sale shortly. I believe some of Macromedia's partners also have plans along these lines.
I don't think this really is going to help if there is a price tag involved. I'm not a flaming Richard Stallman FSF type. I just think that a simple and extensible markup editor is too integral to web applications that it has to be ubiquitous and without constraints.
From what I can tell the Flash developer community doesn't think like we do as coders and backend systems folks. (A real hurdle for Macromedia if they want Flash to be taken seriously as an application platform.) I've been meaning to take a crack at this myself --even going so far as to acquire a copy of Flash MX and draw out a wishlist/spec. However, I've been rather preoccupied and am not much of a Flash developer.
Last, the illogicz editor is indeed read-only. In asking around, I've been told that there is a means for a Flash object to communicate with the embedded pages DOM, but I was given the impression it can be a dicey issue.
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