Then and Now

Back in the early days of the web, applications that required user input had only a small set of input fields that were understandable by Web browsers. These consisted of single-line text boxes, check boxes, and the multi-line text area. This was fine when the majority of the users of the web was technical. For example, they could still perform tasks such as editing of formatted documents by using plain text and a series of patterns of characters that indicated the structure of the document. The most common was then, and still is, HTML.

Fast forward a few years. The web has gone main stream. It is no longer the case that the majority of the users of the web are technical. Today the web is visited by people of every imaginable skill, education level, and life experience. Therefore, applications now need to provide interfaces that meet the needs of all those groups. Instead of editing raw text and markup, it is far more convenient for most users to work with "Word Processor" style document editing. It is far simpler for, say, a grandmother to make some text bold by just selecting it and clicking on a "bold" button, than it is for her to know cryptic series of characters have to be put around text in order for it to be processed as bold.

Simply put, if you want to expand the reach and usability of your applications that allow document-style input on the web, then you need a Rich Text Editor. The Dojo Toolkit Rich Text Editor is designed to meet the requirements of many of these applications. It is a flexible, pluggable, editor that can expose as few, or as many, editing features as your application may require. The following list provides a quick overview of the powerful capabilities of the Dojo Toolkit Rich Text Editor.

Features

1. Provides Rich Text (word processor-like), editing of HTML documents.
2. Provides a large selection of built-in actions. The default rich text editor of the dojo toolkit provides built-in commands for nearly all the common word processor type actions, such as bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, indent, delete, insert, and so on.
3. Provides cross-browser support. The RTE capabilities of browsers vary in what they provide and how they are set up. The dijitEditor abstracts this away and provides a single way to create a rich-text editing field in your pages.
4. Provides built-in filtering support. The editor provides hooks to register HTML and DOM filters with the editor, to pre and post process data going in, or coming out of, the document being edited.
5. Provides a pluggable architecture. The editor's functionality is not limited to the set provided by the Dojo toolkit. It can be extended by implementing plugins, following the "dijit._editor.Plugin" interface. In fact, all the base commands of editor are implemented as instances of that plugin interface. The plugin architecture makes it relatively easy to add new buttons and actions to the toolbar as well as 'headless plugins', which simply register filters or augments existing actions.

More Information

For more information, refer to the online documentation.