MozillaZine

Rich-Text Editing with Midas

Monday April 7th, 2003

mike writes: "DevEdge has published an article, written by Doron Rosenberg, that gives an introduction to Midas for web developers. It covers basic usage and the differences between Mozilla's and IE's designMode implementations.

"The article is a good getting started guide if you're interested in doing cross-platform, in-browser content editing."

#1 Does Midas have a life past Mozilla 1.4?

by pmsyyz

Monday April 7th, 2003 8:52 PM

Does Midas have a life past Mozilla 1.4? With focus shifting to Phoenix as the Mozilla browser component after 1.4, and Phoenix not working with Midas since Composer is compiled out, will Midas be converted to a browser extension?

#2 Re: Does Midas have a life past Mozilla 1.4?

by doron

Monday April 7th, 2003 10:47 PM

who says composer will be compiled out? Composer code is used a lot in mail (and ergo minotaur). Midas is important for IE parirty and is used a lot in web applications - no way its going to be killed.

#3 Re: Re: Does Midas have a life past Mozilla 1.4?

by bzbarsky

Tuesday April 8th, 2003 12:49 AM

Composer will indeed be compiled out of Phoenix, I would hope. Midas is a separate story. Maybe this will prompt us to finally kick composer's ass into a reasonable separation of code that's needed for HTML editing and code that's necessary for composer proper.

#6 Composer bye bye?

by sime

Tuesday April 8th, 2003 7:46 AM

I love composer. Use it daily, I use every part of the Mozilla suite. Because it is a suite.

#7 Re: Composer bye bye?

by bzbarsky

Tuesday April 8th, 2003 8:47 AM

Composer will simply be a separate app, not part of the browser binary. They will share some core HTML editing code (Browser for Midas, composer for whatever)

#9 Re: Re: Composer bye bye?

by doron

Wednesday April 9th, 2003 2:00 AM

er, that is what I meant, the core editor will still be part of browser.

and we can prove people use it on the web so its not a geek feature :)

#10 Re: Re: Composer bye bye?

by sime

Wednesday April 9th, 2003 3:42 AM

doesnt really make a broswer suite then.

#11 Re: Re: Re: Composer bye bye?

by bzbarsky

Wednesday April 9th, 2003 11:40 AM

What doesn't make a browser suite?

#12 Re: Re: Re: Composer bye bye?

by james

Wednesday April 9th, 2003 7:06 PM

Would you consider Microsoft Office to be a "suite"? It is a set of cooperating applications, although they don't all share the same process (and hence, a Word crash won't cause you to lose your work in Excel, etc). A single process image is not necessary for apps to work together.

#4 Re: Rich-Text Editing with Midas

by james

Tuesday April 8th, 2003 1:42 AM

Midas can be useful to test out small changes to a website content, using the following simple bookmarklet: javascript:(function(){document.designMode="on";})()

#5 Re: Re: Rich-Text Editing with Midas

by pepejeria

Tuesday April 8th, 2003 7:46 AM

Cool, but then changing to "off" doesnt work?

#8 Re: Re: Re:

by james

Wednesday April 9th, 2003 12:06 AM

This limitation is documented on the midas web page at http://www.mozilla.org/editor/midas-spec.html

"Right now, you can't completely turn off editing by setting designMode to "off." Setting designMode to "off" will prevent certain operations from being handled but typing and other actions are still possible."