Thursday 23 November, 2006 at 4:08:06 pm
filed under web
I would just like to let it be known from the outset that, as an excersise (exercize? I can’t even remember how we spell it in this country) in futility, I am attempting to write this entire post within the WP rich editor. Here goes…
I have permenantly switched over to Flock for writing my blog posts, mainly because I can’t stand working within WP’s editor. My list of complaints:
The entire WP interface is painfully, painfully slow. I would blame this on our mediocre internet connection, but the performance I get here when trying to make any changes is significantly worse than I ever had on Blogger and is sometimes even slower than myspace.
Both editors offered, the ‘visual’ and ‘code’, have major flaws; I’ll only address the rich editor today.
The visual editor has a habit of doing very strange things with text. I’ll reach the end of a paragraph, press enter and begin typing again, only to find that I appear to have simply entered a line break and am actually in the same paragraph I just finished. After checking the HTML to see what happened, I’ll return to find that my text has been properly formatted, but another paragraph, consisting of a single space, has been inserted in between.
Button behavior is similarly erratic. The very existence of separate ‘link’ and ‘unlink’ buttons violates several major rules of interface design - there should only be one button for modifying the state of the entire object as the two actions (link and unlink) are (or should be) mutually exclusive. The link/unlink buttons also can’t seem to decide whether or not they convey state information. There have been times when I’ve seen the link button highlighted when over a link, and even once or twice when ‘link’ and ‘unlink’ were both highlighted simultaneously.
The folks at WP, naughty people that they are, are also encouraging violation of the XHTML standards by including buttons for ‘bold’ and ‘italicize’. Content should not dictate specific display information, a fact that seems to have been completely forgotten here. (please not that the preceding sentence was hand-wrapped (ha) in <strong> tags, the way it should be done). Finally, it lacks a number of buttons like <code> that really should be included for full capability.
I’ll deal with the code editor some other time. Happy turkey day to all.
dosnlinux
on Thursday 23 November, 2006 at 6:26:26 pm
I’ve always found that the erratic paragraph behavior annoying, and I’ve learned to ignore the odd link/unlink buttons.
Fona
on Friday 01 December, 2006 at 9:53:28 pm
“exercise”