Re: Status update: WYSIWYG support in Drupal core

On 23-May-09, at 2:41 AM, Daniel F. Kudwien wrote:

> <Digital7> tha_sun: seems like it'd be a top priority for the  
> project..given how significantly it improves the usability

Does anyone know of any papers studying the differences between  
various editor types, and if any of them can be shown to actually  
improve usability and user satisfaction? I did some searching, and I  
found:

http://www.jasoncornwell.net/projects/BloggerFinalReport.pdf

which is about a UI redesign of blogger.com; not much in there other  
than that users found editors to be problematic for image placement,  
and that the concept of previewing an edit didn't stick very well.

I also found this which may be of interest: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/275269.275272

It's from 1998, but many of the issues it finds about HTML editors  
still seem relevant today. Complaints about poor code, overwriting  
custom changes, and general unreliability are mentioned, which all  
seem to apply to most of the JS editors today.

A comparison of WYSIWYG vs WYMIWYG would be very useful.

--Andrew