A long time ago NeoSmart Technologies used to have WYSIWYG editors all over the place, but things just didn’t work out. For one, it was rare for a post with even tiny bit of formatting applied to be rendered as valid XHTML (like the rest of the site), and for another, it was very incompatible with newer versions of certain web browsers and older versions of others – so we got rid of the system.

However, we’ve had quite a few complaints about WordPress’ default requirement for encoded HTML entities, and many posts were lost by including an unencoded “<” or other element. We’re glad to say we’ve found an alternative. We came across the Xinha WYSIWYG editor, a nice (and possibly minimal)-looking editor that has a new experimental HTML-creation engine that produces truly valid code no matter what you throw at it. That and the fact that it can easily be customized (as we’ve done here) and works on almost any browser made it the ideal choice for NeoSmart Technologies.

Anyway, it works fairly well and a spell checking module is also being added at the moment. For anyone not wanting to use the WYSIWYG editor (especially if you’re trying to write some code), you can press the icon of a document with “<>” superimposed on it – that’ll display the pure HTML and you can do what you like from there.