Reinventing the wheel -a WYSIWYG Editor

Question

I dont know whether I am reiventing the wheel.

I need to design an online WYSIWYG where users can make one/two/three-column layout page.The WYSIWYG should adjactly show the contents in design mode as well as preview mode.Therefore, the WYSIWYG should also have the supports for Header and Footer too.Therefore, the WYSIWYG will have at least three boxes(Header, Content,Footer) and in max it may contain six boxes.

IFRAME supports designmode (on/off) and it has content editable property and it also supported by most browsers. Though DIV also has the content editable properly in the latest browsers. Since there are many users who use IE6 still, probably choosing IFRAME is better(need your kind advice).

Now the question is whether I should use 6 IFrames or only one Ifrmae or no Iframe at all? Please suggest.

Thanks.

Answer 1

It sounds to me like you are trying to reinvent the wheel. You should be able to use one of the existing WYSIWYG editors with template support built-in. So I'd suggest you have a look at CKEditor, which probably has all the features you need.

Answer 2

Don't reinvent the wheel! If you decide that you need to support designmode iframes as well as contenteditable, Google Closure Editor has a very performant implementation of multiple editing surfaces that only creates one iframe at a time.

Answer 3

I would look at YUI Editor from Yahoo, The YUI stuff does support a drag and drop column editing. I would say reuse in this case.
EDIT: Since you say you want to edit multiple areas per page you should also check out the YUI Editor's Multi edit example page

Answer 4

Choose whatever existing editor that you like, but don't try to recreate one yourself, you'll become crazy.

I don't even know what do you understand as different between WYSIWYG and "Rich Text Editor", the main difference might be that no web-based editor can be really "What You Get", because there are lots of little problems.

Anyway, it seems that you want to create a page with one toolbar and several editing instances, I think that all the main editors does support that, but I would avoid using one based on a framework (YUI or Google closure) unless you are already using that framework. Check instead the features of stand alone editors like CKEditor or TinyMCE. You'll hardly get anything better that those ones.