Dojo: The Definitive Guide

Editor

Warning

At the time of this writing, the Editor and its plug-in architecture were undergoing some significant enhancements. Thus, you may find that this section is slightly more general with respect to technical details than many other sections of the book.

An increasing number applications are utilizing rich text editing capability; in fact, it's probably fair to say that if you have a slick RIA interface and then hand it to the user with an ordinary textarea element (even a Textarea dijit), it'll probably stick out like a sore thumb. Fortunately, the Editor dijit contains all of the common rich text editing functionality, with absolutely minimal overhead on your part.

Tip

You may find this reference interesting as you read the rest of this section: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Rich-Text_Editing_in_Mozilla.

Dojo builds upon native browser controls that enable content to be editable. As a little history lesson, Internet Explorer 4.0 introduced the concept of design mode, in which it became possible to edit text in a manner consistent with simple rich text editors, and Mozilla 1.3 followed suit to implement what's essentially the same API that eventually became formalized as the Midas Specification (http://www.mozilla.org/editor/midas-spec.html). Other browsers have generally followed in the same direction—with their own minor nuances. In any event, most of the heavy lifting occurs by first explicitly making a document editable and then using the JavaScript execCommand ...