Interesting: FrontPage allows an Automation model with FrontPage.Application, yet you cannot make the UI visible. It seems very odd that there’s no Visible property on this object. Apparently Microsoft doesn’t want us to use FrontPage with other applications. What do they care? You have to have a license?

 

It would be really nice if there was a way to embed the FrontPage Editor into a form… Rats.

 

After spending another few hours yesterday with Help Builder and trying to improve the HTML Editing support via the DHTMLEdit control I'm getting mighty frustrated. The object model is horrendous and while the editing functionality works reasonably well for existing text, it's a real pain for doing things like table editing (inserting rows) and moving in and out of different paragraph formats. The time to build an industrial strength editor with this stuff is too much for me to handle... I get a headache just thinking about it.


Does anybody know if there are any decent HTML Edit controls out there (ActiveX)? There are tons of Web based solutions and but even most of those are pretty screwy.

 

The big issues I have with the controls I've tried are:

  • Pasting text and being able to clean it up
  • Dealing with objects inside of the HTML (like tables, rows etc.)
  • Modifying formatting after it's been applied

For plain text editing what I have now works just fine. THe issues come with more complex issues. The most obvious in Help Builder is pasting text - in most cases a plain Paste operation is fine. But sometimes we might want to paste  text as code. I can intercept the Paste operation and deal with it there but it's not terribly clean either.

 

Along the same lines say I have pasted some text that is code - by accident I decided to paste code out of VS.NET into the Edit control. The formatting VS.NET uses doesn't translate very well into HTML and the spacing and line breaks usually get mangled. I can do my own syntax color highlighting by first capturing the paste data, and then pasting the text after I create the HTML markup.

 

But once the formatting is in there, it becomes near impossible to remove it.

 

Essentially I'd like to see an Html Editor that provides roughly the sort of functinoality that the FrontPage Editor has which is pretty good about automatically dealing with HTML insertions of various kinds and fixing up the text. It also deals with text via straight selections and can automatically figure out what formatting is applied to the current selection. In other words, it acts like you would an editor expect to act.

 

It seems this is a frequent requirement, yet most of the edit controls I've looked at in the past are pretty poor in their HTML support.