BlogAT&T; Another Joomla Headache
Joomla and Firefox are no longer getting along very well. Every time we type the & character, it attaches a semi-colon at the end of the word. For example, AT&T becomes AT&T;
We believe this to be a Firefox bug, but it could be a Joomla bug as well. See, we aren’t using any WYSIWYG editors… it’s all being injected as raw HTML. Regardless, it is confirmed and consistent… so we apologize if we miss some AT&T;’s.
Not to bash Joomla, WordPress is having its own set of writing problems. Safari 3.0 is totally incompatible with its WYSIWYG editor, because S3 and TinyMCE (WP’s WYSIWYG editor) don’t get along. The good news, is that the TinyMCE team already has a fix in beta, and as soon as it goes final, the WordPress folks will incorporate it. What ticks me off, is that the TinyMCE team should have seen this coming long ago… Safari 3 has been in public beta for months, and folks did donate a Mac mini to them for this exact purpose…
We did see this coming. We have been in contact with the WebKit team long before the Safari 3 beta was released. We have been doing tests against their nightly builds etc for years. So thats why the 3.x branch of TinyMCE works pretty well with Safari 3, the problem has been that the core of WebKit still have to many issues and we have been waiting for the WebKit team to catch up and fix these bugs but there has little progress for over a year. So we finally gave up on the waiting part and we have now released an Safari plugin that patches over all the glitches in that browser it’s still not perfect but it’s way better than before.
Here is the master bug for TinyMCE at WebKit:
http://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6627
I hope they will focus more on support for rich editing, it’s still lacking simple concepts like selecting images. The Safari 3 version is a big step up since the 2.x versions of Safari was hopeless you couldn’t even type basic text in lists correctly so it’s good to know that one will be flushed out of the market soon.
I blogged about this bug over on my personal blog awhile back, back when Safari 3 was in beta. The best response I got was to report it as a new issue. I didn’t find the TinyMCE bug at the time, but I was sure someone had already checked it in with WebKit.
I’m certainly not blaming TinyMCE for not being timely, but I would have liked to see a patch for 2.x that barred or warned Safari 3 users that the browser would have issues. Likewise, products that use TinyMCE should auto-detect Safari 3 and switch to a plain-text editor. Everyone saw some of this coming to some degree (users were/are on the front lines of that), and like you said, I agree that Apple should work better on their form support… this is much more their problem than TinyMCE’s.
In a pinch, I still want to be able to post using Safari… even if that means I have to write raw HTML.
Unfortunately I see this becoming more of an issue (web browser incompatibility) than less as time goes on. Javascript is on the verge of fragmenting due to differences of opinion in where to go with the language, so I fully expect that we will be back in the days of no real compatibility across browsers soon. That’s why i typically try to minimize the use of javascript in my Wordpress plugins. Obviously though these type of editors ARE javascript, so I suspect eventually we will be seeing specific versioning of them for specific browsers.
And let’s not talk about mobile device javascript compatibility……
The current 3.x branch of TinyMCE works pretty well with Safari 3 it’s nearly stable so I think it will be possible to patch over all quirks over time.
There is a big problem with RTE support in browsers, the problem is that there is no good specification on how they are supposed to work. The WhatWG spec has some information but it’s way to little. If I have the time I would try to join that group and help them write a descent spec for it and if they want our help.