is there any html editor that can be incorporated into moodle? the current method leaves html code in an awful mess.
It depends what you are trying to achieve. Here are some other html editors that can embedded into Moodle and replace the current html editor.
1) CKeditor
2) Tinyme
3) Dragmath
4) FCKeditor
among others. Here is a link: http://docs.moodle.org/dev/HTML_editor_2.0
Let us know how this works for you.
ROCServe Ltd
What do you mean by "current method" leaving html code in an awfull mess ??? Do you mean that your browser does not show editor?
Moodle 2 has TinyMCE as default editor unless something is breaking the source of your site or if you have disabled editor. Moodle 1.X had HTMLArea as default editor and there were at least 10 different reasons for missing editor - starting from injected code, google analytics scripts etc.
it doesn't maintain a neat html layout as i could on an extrenal editor such as dreamweaver. each time i return to the code it loses any returns or spaces i've added which were placed to enable me to change code without searching.
Oh - that kind of mess
TinyMCE or other online editors are not layout management tools - they are just giving HTML with some css...
If you need to have multiple "returns" use <SHIFT> and <Enter> to get line breaks - pressing multiple times <Enter> creates <p></p><p></p>... strings and those are really cut to single <p></p>
Also multiple spaces (   ) are stripped but there is a thing called non-breaking space ( ) that can be used several times and TinyMCE has even a button for this purpose:
Theme css controls part of page layout so the neat things you see in Dreamweaver are not always lost in TinyMCE - some part of Dreamweaver default css is overwritten by YUI reset code/base code/base theme css/custom theme css...
Here you see an example with non-breaking spaces
and linebreaks.
<comment style="kind">mmm I would agree with this, but it is still usable code. There seems to be an inconsistency in that some redundant tags can be stripped out, escape characters, like are sometimes necessary, but disappear. Usually, if the code is well laid out when written it maintains the essential structure minus spaces. I would suggest that "making a mess of it" is far too strong a descriptor to be meaningful though.</comment>
<comment style="unkind">Dreamweaver..BWAAAHHHH!</comment>