As most web developers can probably attest to, often there is a “cringe” moment when you pass off a beautiful, well-oiled, smoothly-running website to a lowly (but important) content editor who was volunteered for the job.
For the sake of this article, I’m going to lump all of the valiant people who get stuck with updating the company’s website into one hypothetical human and call this person Ethel, God bless her heart.
Ethel is a good person who keeps her office running like an Indy Car, she stays on top of those TPS reports, And she watches the front desk - but when she updates the website, she pastes content in from Microsoft Word.
(I could go off at this point on why there isn’t a person dedicated to updating a website - a crucial tool of communication between a business entity and it’s target audience - but that is another topic.)
For the people reading this that doesn’t understand why pasting content into your website’s Content Management System is bad, then let me quickly explain. Copying and pasting test from word processors beings along lots of hidden data that controls how text looks. This is called “inline style” and it’s the bane of a website that has the style controlled globally via Cascading Style Sheets.
These inline styles sneak into your content like mice into barns and before you know it, the website site looks like an insane ransom note. Your global style sheets, which were developed and set up by a professional designer/communicator, can’t override these inline styles.
That’s just one example of how Ethel can unwittingly diminish the communication power of the website.
Web developers are always looking for the best tool to produce good clean content while being easy. Today I ran across one I hadn’t seen before, a great open-source project called WYMeditor. It’s well on it’s way to becoming the neatest document editor I have yet seen.
According to the description on the website:
WYMeditor’s main concept is to leave details of the document’s visual layout, and to concentrate on its structure and meaning, while trying to give the user as much comfort as possible (at least as WYSIWYG editors).
The neat approach WYMeditor takes is to visually display the markup. If you’ve got a paragraph, it’s clearly visible. If you’ve got a heading level 1, it’s obvious. The editor leaves out font size changes, color changes, and all of those old depreciated tools that put inline styles into the document.
The automatic stripping of these inline styles from content pasted from a word processor is not done yet, but it’s on the horizon. At that point I predict this editor will become one of the best available.
It does these things while remaining very simple to use - so Ethel won’t have a bit of trouble with it. These are truly great times we live in.
Technorati Tags: cascading_style_sheets, web_developers, inline_styles, professional_designer, communication_power, content_editor, word_processors, global_style, inline_style
July 27th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Microsoft word users either need to paste into Notepad first or use the extended toolbar’s (shift-alt-v for pc and ctrl-v for mac) paste from Word or paste as text command. I’m not whether it works in Safari or not though.
March 5th, 2008 at 9:33 am
[…] back I wrote about the problem of allowing website managers to write valid content for their content managed […]