Find out why RealObjects' HTML WYSIWYG Editor Control edit-on Pro outperforms online editor solutions based on Microsoft's IE DHTML editing control

A) About Microsoft IE DHTML editing control based editors

An IE/DHTML (also known as Microsoft IE DHTML editing control) editor solution is not platform independent because it is only usable on Windows x86 platforms with IE installed. Other browsers, platforms, OS etc. such as Netscape, Mozilla, Apple Mac OS, Sun Solaris, Linux, PDAs ... are not supported. The most common Microsoft IE editing control based solutions require the installation of 3-5 MB client-site software.

Furthermore, IE/DHTML editor vendors have zero control over the parsing, code generation and editing behavior of their tools, since these parts of their products are developed and copyrighted by Microsoft. The IE/DHTML vendors do not have the code for these parts because this functionality is only available in binary form - as the Microsoft IE DHTML editing control. This control (some DLLs) is part of IE 5.x or higher and also available as a SDK from Microsoft. Because of this dependence on Microsoft and IE DLLs, IE/DHTML based solutions are quite sensitive to DLL version mix-ups and then require installation and troubleshooting on the client.

IE/DHTML based editors are usually ActiveX controls requiring ActiveX activation within the IE's security settings. This is prohibited by many corporate intranet security policies. It is known that IE/DHTML based editors offer quite good HTML

B) RealObjects HTML WYSIWYG Editor Control edit-on Pro

In contrast to IE/DHTML based editors RealObjects edit-on Pro has following advantages:

1. Platform independence
edit-on Pro is fully platform independent because it builds upon Java. Supported browsers and platforms include, but are not limited to:

Client operating systems supported:

• Microsoft Windows 2000
• Microsoft Windows XP
• Linux 2.x
• Sun Solaris 8/9/10
• Mac OS X 10.4

Browsers supported:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6
• Firefox 1.0
• Firefox 1.5
• Mozilla 1.7
• SeaMonkey
• Netscape 8
• Apple Safari 2.0
• Opera 8.5

2. Zero client installation => Zero deployment costs
No client installation is required. This saves the costs for software distribution and installation, and you will not encounter compatibility issues caused by wrong DLLs etc. These savings can easily surpass the edit-on Pro license costs.

3. Highly adaptable
The toolbar of edit-on Pro is fully customizable. You can enable/disable every single icon, you are able to group icons using separators, change the toolbar order or replace the standard icons with your own icons of different size. The look-and-feel of the editor can be changed by using various parameters, e.g. you can comfortably change colors or enable/disable the "Source view" of the editor. Every toolbar function can be disabled during load-time to constrain the editing power you give to the user. For example, you can limit the use of different fonts or certain text styles. You can even do this per user or per gropup configuration.

For integration with back-end multimedia/image repositories and with automatic link management, edit-on Pro provides an automatic image upload mechanism. For example users can "copy and paste" or "drag and drop" images from a local hard drive or website to the editor. They can even draw graphics (e.g. using MS Word) and paste or drop them into the editor. When saving the document users will have the possibility to rename each image file and sort the images into the determined WebDAV server directory while the file path of the images will automatically be converted from the original source to the WebDAV server during the automatic image upload process.

4. Technology advantage
RealObjects has developed edit-on Pro entirely with its highly qualified developer team. The Java code was written from scratch. We have developed our own parser, code generator, editor, renderer etc. in 100% pure Java without building upon third-party libraries. This allows us to quickly follow industry trends and customer demands.

Moreover, our solution is tailored to the needs of CMS vendors/integrators who usually don't like to give users full FrontPage-like functionality. So, compliance with CI/CD standards can be guaranteed by separating content and layout as much as possible. Therefore, edit-on Pro has been limited to the most important features and by that stays clean and smaller in size.