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Elements - Rich Text Editor



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CommonSpot Elements

Content Well: Rich Text Editor

One of the features that makes CommonSpot simple and easy to use is the Rich Text Editor. This element presents a familiar, Word®-like editing interface in your Web browser, allowing you to create, edit, and format text without HTML authoring expertise. The editor translates text and image positioning and formatting to HTML, and validates the HTML to ensure that it is in compliance with accessibility and technical standards. The editor will also test any Web site links included in the text, and provide a warning if a URL is not accessible.

The editor is configured to work with the SCU Web site style sheet, so that you can apply formatting that is consistent with the rest of the SCU site. In order to make full use of the font size, color, and style attributes controlled by the site's style sheet, the Rich Text Editor is configured to remove any font tags that would otherwise set font size and color. The style sheet applies font sizes and colors to specific HTML elements such as heading tags, links, and paragraph tags, so that documents are displayed consistently throughout the site.

The Rich Text Editor presents a toolbar for creating and modifying the following:

  • HTML "snippets" - headings, floating image and caption tables, pull quotes.
  • Lists, Ordered and Un-ordered
  • Blockquotes
  • Tables
  • Images
  • Special Characters
  • CommonSpot Site, Subsite, Page, and User data
Word Cleanup 

If you're copying and pasting content from Microsoft Word, you'll be presented with a few "paste" options: paste formatted, paste without formatting, paste plain, and paste code.  "Paste formatted" is selected by default.  When you paste Word-formatted content into the Rick Text Editor, a large amount of extra HTML markup is carried over from Word - Word attempts to apply its own presentation markup to the text.  This can result in unexpected results in the page display, due to conflicts between Word-specific styles and the SCU site's style sheet.

The Rich Text Editor form includes a "Word Cleanup" button that can be used to remove the extra Word HTML markup.

Here's a side-by-side comparison of HTML copied and pasted with Word formatting intact, and a "cleaned" version:

Word-formatted HTMLCleaned  HTML

<A title="" href="#_edn1" name=_ednref1><SPAN class=MsoEndnoteReference><SPAN ><SPAN class=MsoEndnoteReference><SPAN >[i]</SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></A>		<A title="" href="#_edn1" name=_ednref1>[i]</A>

Note: CommonSpot will "time out" after 30 minutes of non-activity.  If you've spent over 30 minutes writing content, but haven't clicked "finish" within that time, your changes will be lost when you eventually click the "finish" button. Be sure to save changes periodically by clicking the Rich Text Editor's "finish" button if you're working on a complex document, or if you have to step away from your Web browser for a period of time.

HTML Standards
Document structure

Using HTML's structural elements to build your page is definitely worth the extra effort and attention to detail. A document that uses headings to define the structure of the page and lists to organize content will more easily transition to other document formats with its formatting intact.

A well-formed HTML document can be copied into Word and still reflect the page layout and formatting from the original Web version.

And as new ways of viewing Web content become more common, adherence to basic markup standards will mean that content can transition from a desktop PC Web browser to a PDA or Web-enabled wireless phone without having to be reconstructed for each device.

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