NetWedit is an experimental WYSIWYG editor written as a JavaScript library and is designed to be plugged into Web forms.
The need for such a tool arose for a particular project, an online teaching database for the Theology Faculty at the University of Oxford, where Faculty staff with no knowledge of HTML needed to format various information via Web forms ready to be stored in a database. Staff work on a variety of machines, including Apple Macs. So a cross-platform approach was needed.
Eventually a simple client-side approach was adopted using JavaScript. Although there are plenty of DHTML scripts for IE, there appeared to be nothing comparable for Netscape, so NetWedit has been developed to try and fill the gap. This is very much a prototype, so comments are most welcome by email to: Paul Trafford.
The system is designed for Netscape4+ and seems to work for such browsers in most setups - Windows, Linux, Mac etc. With little effort, support has been added for IE4+ on Windows, but it doesn't yet work on IE on a Mac.
NetWedit is provided as open source software under the GNU General Public License. This means that you are free to use and modify it, provided that what you derive remains subject to the same license and that you don't incorporate the program in proprietary software. Details of the license are provided with the distribution. If in doubt, please get in touch.
A distribution of NetWedit, version 0.2_4, can be obtained as a small bundle:
You can see how NetWedit works by trying the demonstration, which also explains how the script is used.
This tool is an example of what has been called 'Through The Web' (TTW) editing. A list of various tools is provided by Paul Browning at TTW WYSIWYG Editor Widgets. We tried quite a few of these approaches, particularly the Java, and hope to produce a report in due course covering some of our experiences.