Wishlist for WYSIWYG textarea plugin

wyswig-editor-wishlist.md

FACT

Every javascript WYSIWYG-plugin sucks, one way or another

Wishlist

• Not Microsoft Office-toolbar-ish (that is, not big, bloated and colorful)
• Only the basic stuff: Bold, italic, links, lists and image embedding
• When pasting rich text into the textarea (for instance from Microsoft Word), all formatting except the basic stuff should be filtered out (for instance, font size or paragraph confusion)
• When embedding images, the image should be wrapped in a styleable container (probably <figure>)
• Image embedding should support captions
• Image embed-buttons should be hidden on systems w/o user accessible file systems (iOS, I'm looking at you)
• Proper support for multiple textareas with different toolbars (you don't want image embedding everywhere)

Less important: Rails integration (as a gem)

• Carrierwave / paperclip support for upload
• Form helpers without inline script tags on each textarea
• Proper support for the Asset Pipeline

Even less important: Geek-friendlyness

• The resulting markup should be markdown – so we can save light and clean markdown in the database. (might not be possible, but hey, this is a wishlist)
• A toggle to actually edit the markdown code

I would like to see more friendly customisation to insert custom styles. Not inline styles (I hate inline styles, they all do it!) but a selection of classes I can control in the drop down (and not all classes from my main stylesheet). So instead of the buttons adding inline styles, they add classes for pre-defined styles from a stylesheet. Other editors can do it, but it can be difficult to configure in the JS configs.