For quite a long time now qooxdoo-contrib includes a WYSIWYG html editing widget called HtmlArea. During the last few weeks Jonathan and I have been busy improving the existing widget, and have now released a new version.
Since there are many other open source projects around with a similar technical approach, why haven't we just picked one of those and ported them to (or just used them with) qooxdoo? Well, we think we have a slightly different focus and goal in mind than the other projects: We wanted to create a solid, clean cross-browser widget, focusing on a fundamental set of functionality rather than a full-blown WYSIWYG editor. HtmlArea intends to support all the four major browsers that include basic html editing capability in their most recent versions. Well, to be fair, that is a long-term goal, with IE and Firefox currently getting more love than Safari or Opera.

Today we released a new version HtmlArea 0.2 with the following features:

• Text formatting
  • font family
  • font size
  • font weight
  • text decoration
  • font style
  • text color
  • background color
  • text indention
• Complete Undo / Redo handling
• Insertion of HTML elements
  • table
  • image
  • list
  • horizontal ruler
• Easily expendable to insert custom HTML

See a simple live demo.

In a future release we would like to include some kind of plug-in architecture which would allow for an easier development of extensions to HTMLArea. We also think about different feature sets (e.g. basic, simple and advanced) for different users' needs. Please also note that one of the next versions will target qooxdoo 0.8 and might not work with previous qooxdoo versions.

Let us know what you think about HtmlArea so far. The infrastructure of qooxdoo-contrib allows anyone to contribute to qooxdoo quite easily - either by collaborating on existing features or on starting and maintaining new ones.