Evaluation of web based WYSIWYG-editors - test result

(This page belongs to the article Evaluation of WYSIWYG-editors by Peter Krantz)

Below is the detailed result for the tested editors. If you find an error, please leave a comment or send an email to pete at standards-schmandards.com. The test criteria evaluate markup functionality rather than formatting features. Each editor was used to create the a sample document after which the resulting code was inspected.

Test result
Test EditOnPro XStandard eWebEditPro CuteEditor TinyMCE FCK-editor JXHTML-Edit Kupu
Version tested 4.3 1.6.2 4.2.0.11 5.2 2.0.4 2.2 4.0.005 1.3.5
Headings Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes (9) Yes
Paragraph Yes Yes Yes No (8) Yes Yes No (2) No (2)
Link title Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes No No
List Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Nested list Yes Yes Yes Yes No (3) No (3, 14) Yes No (3)
Nested list (mixed type) Yes No Yes Yes No (3) No (3) Yes No (3)
Table headers Yes Yes Yes (15) Yes (7) Yes No No Yes (4)
Table caption Yes Yes Yes (15) Yes No Yes No No
Table summary Yes Yes Yes (15) Yes Yes Yes No No
Language (13) No (6) No (6) No No No (6) No (6) No No
Acronym No Yes No No No No No (10) No
Emphasis Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No (10) No
Strong emphasis Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No (10) No
Quote, inline No No No No No No No (10) No
Quote, block Yes (1) No Yes (1) Yes (1) Yes (1) No No (10) No
Image alt-text Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No (11) No
IE 6 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Firefox 1.5 Yes Yes (12) Yes No (7) Yes Yes Yes Yes
Safari Yes No (5) No Yes Yes No (5) Yes Yes
Score (out of 19) 16 14 14 14 13 9 7 6

Notes:

  1. Blockquote can be created but the icon indicates indenting instead of quoting. This can lead to misuse of the blockquote element for formatting purposes.
  2. The br element is used instead of p.
  3. It looks like a nested list kan be created, but the HTML list elements are incorrectly nested and thus creates invalid markup.
  4. Only column headers can be created.
  5. A Safari version is being developed. See article comment for more details.
  6. Language kan be set for some elements but not for arbitrary inline passages of text.
  7. Uses a cumbersome method to create table headers. Does not seem to work in Firefox 1.5. Header scope can not be edited.
  8. Paragraphs can be created though a toolbar button. The default behaviour when pressing enter is the adding of a div or br (depending on which browser hosts the editor component).
  9. Headings ahre created by selecting "H1", "H2" etc from a dropdown. This assumes that the content editor is aware of HTML.
  10. Element can be created by selecting it from a dropdown. This requires the editor to be aware of HTML.
  11. Alt-text can be edited but no empty alt-attribute appears if field is left blank.
  12. Windows only.
  13. Language of arbitrary selected inline text.
  14. Behavious different depending on browser container. Correctly nested in Internet Explorer, but wrong in Firefox 1.5.
  15. Requires the user to create the table first and then add summary, caption and header information.