Enforce Site Standards

Support of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Support of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are a simple mechanism to add style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to web documents allowing a company to control the layout and to enforce corporate document/site standards. edit-on Pro supports inline styles as well as internal and external style sheets based on a subset of CSS2 which includes creating and editing of styles and an API to import/export styles and style sheets.

By using CSS edit-on Pro users/authors can easily and quickly format their content, as a preselection of formatting options can be offered within the editor's toolbar and menus while other editor functions (e.g. bold toolbar button, font and color options) are completely disabled by the integrator. Consequently users/authors can only use the formatting options allowed by the integrator. This will significantly improve the quality of the content within your web-based application.

Styles also can be created and modified using the style sheet property dialog, which is not displayed in general to regular users/authors, as the integrator usually provides default styles for formatting the overall content. edit-on Pro automatically recognizes cascading style sheets and provides appropriate text styles in the style menu - so new and updated pages consistently match the specified look and feel of your document/site. Besides that cascading style sheets further extend web accessibility to all types of users/authors.

For more information see also Block-level and inline styles support

Template-based publishing through CSS based read-only elements and areas

Template-based publishing through CSS based read-only elements and areasRealObjects edit-on Pro is the only in-browser WYSIWYG editor that supports read-only elements and read-only areas.

Using CSS the integrator can specify certain areas/parts of a document as read-only content, which can not be modified by the editor of the document. For example, editing actions such as typing, deleting, changing the font size etc. executed on read-only content or on a selection overlapping it is ignored.

Read-only elements can not be removed from a document. However, the content within a read-only element may be modified by the user. For example, when users are not allowed to remove certain parts of the document, such as news headlines, but are allowed to edit them, the integrator can utilize read-only elements.

This unique feature allows the integrator to define document templates, which can be used to enforce corporate design and content guidelines while facilitating document editing. A pre-selection of templates could be offered to the users through customized toolbar buttons, dialogs, pull-down or context menus.

Why edit-on Pro outperforms other in-browser editor solutions

You might find other in-browser editor solutions within the web. They of course provide basic ranges of functionality (e.g. bold, italic, underline etc.), but no advanced editing support, such as CSS, DTD or WebDAV.

Most of them are tied to a particular browser, particular platform or both. They do not provide full editing power to the authors, are not really customizable and rather difficult to integrate while causing high integration, deployment and maintenance costs.

A few solutions claim XHTML compliance by just using Tidy/JTidy or "XML support" by just displaying XML-like tags within the WYSIWYG view, but they actually are not able to guarantee real XHTML compliance or properly validate and treat so called custom XML tags. Just test those solutions by editing/deleting closing and/or nested tags and you will see what happens. The document will not be XHTML compliant anymore!

Enhanced custom element/tag usage and rendering via CSS

To ease and enforce content editing, developers can entirely control the usage and rendering of XHTML/XML custom elements/tags via CSS, including: