WYSIWYG Editor Component for Tools

Background

Many of the HL7 Tools are used to develop documentation of a specification -- either the HL7 standards themselves, or localizations of those specifications, or implementation documentation. Within the Model Interchange Format (MIF), this documentation is captured as one or another form of "annotation" or "description", and the XML schema for these is a restriction of the W3C XHTML specification (that excludes forms and controls, etc.).

Requirements

Thus, there is a generic need for a WYSIWYG editor component that can be incorporated in a variety of HL7 tools, including today's PubDB and RMIM Designer. A common component will give all tools a common "look-and-feel" and thus simplify training.

Specific Requirements

• WYSIWYG Editor that can be embedded in other tools
• Support for creating and editing instances with the full range of XHTML elements supported by the MIF, while prohibiting those excluded by the MIF
  • Essentially this means no use of CSS, forms or controls but support for pretty much everything else
• Support defined XSL style-sheets to allow HL7 (and users) to determine how one "sees" particular XHTML constructs.
• Able to edit a fragment of a document without the need for HTML or BODY tags
• Include or able to incorporate a spell checker
• Needs to be able to run locally under Eclipse
• Should be invocable from a COM environment as well (to support current PubDb needs)
• Needs to have a license that allows free distribution, and ideally, distribution under the Eclipse framework

Preliminary examples (good and bad)

XML Spy

HL7 has been using the XML Spy "Authentic View" capability in support of the PubDb for several years. Although this meets some of the requirements, it has a clunky interface; an imperfect rendering; and is error prone.

FCKeditor

Lloyd McKenzie writes:

Has anyone dug into FCKeditor http://www.fckeditor.net? Name is a tad unfortunate, but it looks pretty cool. It's open source under LGPL. It supports plugins (which we could use for some of our HL7-specific references) and is customizable in terms of what edits are supported (allowing us to punt the ability to include controls and other 'non-desired' features). The wysiwyg aspect seems to work quite well, including keyboard control such as "Ctrl-i" for italics.

As an additional point of interest, there's a plugin for media-wiki that allows you to use this as the editor for your wiki content, which might be more easily accessible to some users.

DoJo Toolkit AJAX LIbraries and Editor2

Steve Speicher writes:

I've recently subscribed to this list and funny this comes up. We (IBM along with GlobalSubmit) have been working on a web application for the RCRIM/SPL work. In that work we use FCKEditor for the <v3:text> block and we use XHTML for the host language and XForms for editing the SPL XML instance.

We have hit some limits with the FCKeditor and are exploring some other options, most notably are the DojoToolkit AJAX libraries and the Editor2 component. We are continuing to work towards a more robust solution that is HL7 capable. Our plan is to engage with your group to see how we can contribute this to the broader HL7 community for use in plain HTML web applications, as well as XForms based.

Perhaps there would be an opportunity to demonstrate the work we have so far and discuss the development of the HL7-specific rich-text editor widget

TinyMCE

Ravi Natarajan writes:

We are using this editor http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/ for models content editing and I recently looked into http://sourceforge.net/projects/jxhtml this one also.

and:

We are very willing to share our use of the tiny mce xhmtl editor. The tiny MCE provides pure xhmtl tags without head/body tags. So we talking in pure xhmtl snippets. I think the tiny MCE editor can be adapted for primary tooling req. Adam [Flinton] should be able to throw more information into this.

RichFaces Editor

Davide Magni writes:

We are using this editor [1]. We have just start to use the editor in our e-healt solution and easy to integrate in our web page base on xhtml and JSF.

WYMEditor

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Eclipse Based Rich Editors

VEX

Visual Xml Editor

• Unsure if project is active
• Support for DITA and DocBook

RichHTML4Eclipse

TinyMCE based plug-in for Eclipse.

• Last maintained in 2006

Eclipse Embedded MIDAS

MIDAS is the JavaScript plug-in used in the GMail web client