I am thinking of converting my forum input textarea exclusively to TinyMCE HTML editor. I already have both options but it is a pain maintaining both and inserting images in textarea needs preview etc…
This is more of a general question. Do you think it is safe to include HTML editor (with all the safety measures like paste only text, filter for html not allowed etc…) as the only kind of editor on a forum? It’s 2011 and machines are generally fast, connection are better.
What are the downsides of using HTMl editor instead of text field? I can not imagine a blog CMS to have “normal” textarea for input.
But for some reason on forums I do not see many html editors… Even the TinyMCE site has a textarea for their editor. So is there really something to watch out for and a no go…?
I know it is more of a phylosophical question, but I guess you have experience with forums, blogs, etc…
My site is about cooking and beeing able to insert pictures (and upload them) the easy way seems to be a big plus for our home cooks 😉
If you don’t consider security (you’ll need to filter the HTML input on the server side so it won’t contain anything dangerous), there’s only the user experience left for consideration. On a forum you write text most of the time. There’s seldom any use for more functionality than bold, italics and images. The solution used here on Stack Overflow addresses this by having a very limited set of functions, and applying it in the textarea with a sane markup language.
Other forums either use old software or didn’t think the improved user experience was worth the effort. The textarea-only solution fits most forums well enough since most of the input is text-only anyway.
I do think you would benefit from HTML input. Make sure that only allowed HTML can be sent though, since the user can circumvent everything on the client side.