11 Mar 2003
Blog Frustrations

Well, I've run into my first real "annoyance" with Radio Userland software. And with a program called blogBuddy. They both stem from the editing interface in Radio. And they led me to an annoyance with Mozilla.

When I first installed Radio, I noted the availability of a WYSIWYG editor, but only if you were using Mircrosoft IE as your browser (and apparently, only versions greater than 5.5, though I can't vouch for that. OK, so they took advantage of Microsoft exposing a new DLL. For the PC only - no WYSIWYG for the Mac at all.

As regards IE, I'm one of those guys who'd rather run ANY OTHER BROWSER. On the PC, between IE and Outlook, it's almost as though Microsoft had a franchise on virii from the CDC... and on the Mac, IE5 is remarkably slower than other browsers.

So I run Mozilla. On the Mac (although I'm looking into Safari) I use Mozilla as my default browser, and Mail.app as my primary email client. On the PC I use both the browser and the mail client in Mozilla. As an interesting aside, both mailers point to an IMAP server running on the MAC, with fetchmail aggregating and filtering my POP accounts.

I checked into available editor modules and add on's for Mozilla, notably Xopus and htmlAREA. The former wouldn't work at all, but the latter looked quite nice in Mozilla 1.3

So I tried to edit it into the desktop template - to no avail. I haven't really been able to drill down deep enough into Radio's macros to find the exact error, but it just don't work. I noticed that there's some more serious FM going on in those macros than meets the eye, however, and rapidly came to the conclusion that treating the tags correctly was probably impossible without redoing some things pretty deep in Radio itself.

It's not so much that Radio seems to favor IE on Windows, it more the way the macros are implemented that has me confused. It's not exactly self-documenting in there, and the available documentation that I have been able to surf across (mostly on Userland's site) has been woefully inadequet.

So I tried blogBuddy. A waste - notepad is better. It's not WYSIWYG at all - its rather like the old HotDog or HoTMetaL. Why on earth I would want to use such a tool when I could just open up notepad for more or less the same thing (or just type into the form directly) is beyond me.

But in some regard, blogBuddy bothers me more. You see,it's written in Delphi. I know how to do the markup thing with a RichEdit control and then an RTF to HTML control. Why they took the approach they did is kinda beyond me. Maybe to do with the licensing (GPL)? I've just downloaded the source and I gotta look at this stuff....

My annoyance with Mozilla is more with the Mozilla documentation than the program itself. Judging by many tantalizing hints, I'm pretty sure that Mozilla 1.3alpha implements a kind of IE like WYSIWYG editor. I just can't find it!

So here I sit - typing raw HTML into Mozilla. I will get a solution for this, even if I have to code it myself.

00:00 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link