When will there be a cross-browser cross-platform WYSIWYG editor for CMS's that really gives you what you are seeing, and gives it to you no matter what browser you're using to enter the content?  At the recent Web for Development Conference at the World Bank, Rodolfo Quevenco presented the recent redesign of the International Atomic Energy Agency's public website.  The new IAEA website is valid CSS and XHTML, and even lists the validating links in its footer.  Quevenco briefly mentioned the issue of a usable WYSIWYG editor for CMS's near the close of his remarks. 

What good is a CMS if it doesn't make content production any easier for the web managers?  How hard can it be to make a line break a line break?  Well, if you've implemented any editors, you'll know it is complicated and you probably played around w/ code filters to try to get a paragraph tag identified as a p tag, and somehow nuke all that microsoft Word garbage code whenever a user pastes into an editor from Microsoft Word.  Just imagine the people porting the editors to work w/ different CMS's.

At the end of Quevenco's remarks, approximated with the comment on WYSIWYG editors, everyone seemed to look around the room of about 150 people as to say, "where can I file my complaint?  who wants to hear my WYSIWYG horror story or amazing but shortlived success?"  After Quevenco closed, about six of us sitting within a 6 foot radius suddenly stood up and gravitated into a small support-group circle and began saying, "Where is that editor?!  Nothing works!  It's our biggest problem!  Everyone pastes into the little text box from different applications and everything turns into some crazy abstraction almost never rendering a coherent block of paragraphed text.  What a nightmare!"

We're still using HTMLArea often, but are now testing out TinyMCE to see how it behaves.  If you have to know code to get a paragraph to look like a paragraph and not a some jumbled text maze with hidden line breaks half the width of the text area on the page, then you quickly become limited in what you can do.  When your WYSIWYG is also your image insertion and preview assistant, and it cannot do text, what good is that?  We've figured out some tricks.

In closing, I recently put together a survey using the Drupal/CivicSpace survey module and the text area for submission had HTMLArea turned on.  I gave the editor a long, hard stare wondering what in the world is this text I am about to paste going to look like on the other end in my inbox where the web survey results are sent?  Will it be legible?  Will it be so bad my anti-virus software will think its some new virus and nuke it?  I smiled and pasted from notepad first into HTMLArea and sent it.  Then I pasted in from Word and sent it.  Then I turned the editor off and pasted from Word into the editor.  Guess what?  Don't use HTMLArea for the survey module; turn it off and just let people paste or type into the text box.  It will look beautiful!