HTML editor and compatible browsers

HTML editor and compatible browsers

by Pete Jones -
Number of replies: 4

Hi

Does anyone know on which browsers the html editor works best, and on which there are problems.

I've found the following in the moodle documentation:

"The HTML editor does not work in all browsers. If you are using a Mac OS X and for some reason it does not appear, try using Firefox instead of Safari as a browser"

"HTMLArea only supports Firefox and Internet Explorer"

I've also found this as one possible reason why there could be problems with the html editor: "Settings of browser (javascript may be disabled)"

The html editor is freezing for some of our teachers and doing things like changing the text when they save their feedback comments, e.g. it sometimes extends a strikethrough of one word to a strikethrough of a whole paragraph.

I'd like to be able to advise our teachers to use a certain browser. I can do it by a process of elimination, but I was just wondering if anyone knew already.

Thanks.

Pete

When one of my teachers is using

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In reply to Pete Jones

Re: HTML editor and compatible browsers

by nigel barker -
I can only say that from my experience there is no rich editor in:
safari
konqueror
chrome / iron
I think these are all web-kit based, aren't they?

but there is in:
firefox / iceweasel
epiphany

I had an embarrassing situation when once I was explaining that only IE strays from standards, and that free software such as moodle always works properly with standards-compliant browsers!

In my school Firefox and Iceweasel are the default browsers, so most teachers are OK.
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In reply to nigel barker

Re: HTML editor and compatible browsers

by Pete Jones -

Thank you, Nigel.

That's really useful to know.

Pete

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In reply to nigel barker

Re: HTML editor and compatible browsers

by Mauno Korpelainen -

This is only true for current configuration and version of default editor HTMLArea - moodle 2.0 will "support" all these browsers with different editor, TinyMCE.

Different versions of different browsers have also different ways to handle different code - you can't really say that any browser would support web standards.

W3C publishes Recommendations, which are considered Web standards but there is no browser that supports all of them. Moodle can't help it and even if editors like TinyMCE or CKEditor can output valid XHTML they can't output any standard code that would look the same in IE6-8, FF2-3, SafariXX, Opera XX, Chrome etc. If user creates some web pages and pastes the code to editor css is not usually included and content may look different. Or if you paste 10 pages from Word to editor without (auto)cleaning the MSHTML you never know what happens - or your html may have scripts that can't work the same way in moodle as on those pages / programs where you originally had them.

Not even all "basic css tags" are cross browser compatible - see for example http://westciv.com/wiki/CSS_compatibility_table_for_current_browsers

If you need to select the most reliable browser to be used with HTMLArea it is Firefox (less bugs than in IE).

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In reply to Mauno Korpelainen

Re: HTML editor and compatible browsers

by Pete Jones -

Thanks, Mauno.

I understand that it's impossible to find the perfect browser, but I'll take the closest one (Firefox) and recommend that to our teachers to minimise the number of issues we're having.

Pete

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