WYSIWYG Editor And Its Karma

Yesterday, I had to upload a table and a paragraph of text in one of our websites built on Drupal CMS. I prepared the content in OpenOffice.org Writer. I quickly inserted a table and typed the text in a paragraph in OO Writer. I also added some colors to the table to enhance the look and feel of the document. I thought I could easily replicate the design in the Drupal CMS.

I logged in to Drupal and inserted the post with the table and text content. This post defaced the ambiance of the whole web page. The table was displayed in the extreme right and I had to use the horizontal scroll bar in the browser to see the content. The post needed CSS to fix the problem.

I am developing a solution to add a custom CSS file to Drupal from several days. Due to stringent deadlines of the existing projects I'm unable to spend much time on it. The idea of WYSIWYG editor flashed in my mind. I quickly downloaded the TinyMCE software from Moxicode and the TinyMCE module from Drupal. Installed them on the local copy of the Drupal site. The WYSIWYG editor never turned up in the content posting area. I had to spend some more time to fix the installation issue. I did not have enough time to fiddle with WYSIWYG editor installation.

I looked at other alternatives. I exported the OO Writer file to HTML which gave me only 800 lines of XHTML. Inserting 800 lines of XHTML markup was really not worth for a small post.

Finally, I copied and pasted the table from OO Writer to OO Draw. Exported the table as a jpeg image. Uploaded the image and inserted the text in the Drupal site. Added a one liner markup to float the image to the right of the text paragraph. That gave me what I wanted.

Using WYSIWYG editors can be pain in the neck sometimes. I advocate the use of HTML+CSS than using WYSIWYG editors any day. If you use WYSIWYG editors you increase the HTML markup footprint in your web pages. This will sure hit your site's performance. The web pages with 200 lines of HTML markup load faster than those with 5000 lines.