For a long time, people have been trying to edit rich content in their web browsers using HTML text boxes and awkward markup syntax. As wikis and content management systems become more popular, more and more content is being generated in our browsers. Why can't we have WYSIWYG editing, like in a word processor?
Without Mozile, there are two incompatible ways to do rich text editing in a browser. Internet Explorer allows you to set a contentEditable
attribute on an element, and then edit the contents. Firefox and other Mozilla browsers have a setting called designMode
, which lets you edit the whole page, like the old Netscape Composer. The Internet Explorer method is missing some important features, like redo. The Firefox designMode
won't let you pick which parts of a page are editable. But the worst part is that both of these methods are trapped in the last decade: they use out of date HTML code like font
tags, and they have no idea what CSS is. You're limited to the small number of built-in editing commands.
Mozile overcomes these problems in three ways: