HTML authoring in an editorial environment

Question

Having recently produced an HTML/CSS/Javascript based report from various word and excel files sent to me I'm trying to work out how to do this better in future, ideally enabling non-technical users in the office to do many of the tasks currently handed to me.

There are a range of HTML editors out there but none of them seem obviously adept at doing this kind of task. For example, most tables in the document are displayed via a thickbox (jquery plugin). In addition to the table, this requires that I enclose them in a div with various id and class attributes and then create a link at the top of the page looking something like this:

<a href="#TB_inline?height=300&amp;width=700&amp;inlineId=tbtable2"
class="thickbox tablelink" title="Municipal Operating Expenditure (A$m)">Municipal Operating Expenditure</a>

I need a solution that will be careful with my templates, have a WYSIWYG interface, but also provide easy input for this kind of thing without frustrating those in the office with no HTML knowledge, ideally keeping them totally away from the code.

Answer 1

Have you tried FCKEditor. It is very popular and used in a number of blogs, wikis and CMSs. It can produce very clean HTML and is highly customizable.

Answer 2

Get them to use Markdown, just like here, and insert the rendered HTML into your template.

Answer 3

You can't give your non-technial users such a complex HTML template and hope they will not break it. There is no HTML editor that can enforce such rules for structures that are more complex than a class attribute on an element.

This scenario calls for the use of XML: you need to separate your content and presentation.

You should define an XML flavour to describe your report. Then write an XSLT that will transform your <thickbox/> XML element into the HTML structure you describe above.

To allow non-technical users to do some of your tasks, you could use Xopus to make the XML editable (demo). You could do the initial conversion from OOXML, or you could use the copy/paste functionality in Xopus to allow them to copy content from Excel and automatically convert it into your <thickbox/> element.