Matthew Knott

I've been looking around for a rich text editor that works with the iPhone / iPod Touch Safari browser. I sometimes make posts when I'm out and about and manually creating html tags is a real bind, so my options, at a high level are:

• Use a rich text editor
• Add buttons to insert common tags
• Dynamically add paragraph tags based on carriage returns

The problem with the iPhone is that the keyboard is only displayed when the cursor is inside a textarea, which rules out rich text editing, beside the fact that you can't currently highligh a block of text.

The next reasonable option would invove a textarea and using javascript to insert html tags at the cursor point. The only problem with this approach is that although it works it removes focus from the textarea and the keyboard disapears. This is an inconvenience but is the best available option available currently.

Dynamically adding paragraph tags is a time saver, as you just need to focus on typing. The problem occurs when you don't want to automatically add paragraph tags, say around a block of code.

A solution we haven't discussed, which would be ideal, is a custom key / keyboard feature. If you could have a keyboard set aside for custom, complex phrases, that were user programmable, then you could add your html syntax this was. Alternatively, a html key, which when held down, lists 5 / 6 common html tags.

Hopefully, within the next year or so this issue will be addressed for Safari, otherwise, native os html editors will need to be used and the content pasted into the web page, which is far from ideal.

• Development

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