HTMLArea and other browsers

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Update [2006/03/06]

There will be great chances to make HTMLArea work in Opera 9.0 and probably Safari 2.0 (too bad I only have Mac OSX 10.3.9 and I do not intend to upgrade just to have a newer version of Safari).

A lot of good things have happened to these browsers since I initially wrote this page, so please regard this information as obsolete.

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As you may know, HTMLArea currently only works with Mozilla/Firefox (on any platform) and Internet Explorer 5.5 or later for Windows. First off, we would like to point out that we do generally support alternative browsers, as is the case with most of our products. We believe in freedom of choice and we want to provide it to our customers, so even though, sometimes, supporting more browsers means more ugly hacks in the code, we do it--when possible.

Now, why can't HTMLArea work with Apple Safari, Opera or Konqueror? Or, the better question is, why doesn't any JavaScript-based editor support these browsers? Well, because they don't (at least, not yet) expose some essential features that make an WYSIWYG editor possible. Here's what's important:

1. Support for the DOM2 Traversal/Range specification. This API enables developers to modify the content of a document programatically but in an “editor fashion”--like, examine the selection content, delete or clone the selection, add or remove nodes, change the caret position, etc.

   [ It is true that Internet Explorer doesn't support DOM2 Traversal/Range either, but it has an alternative interface (the TextRange object) which provides almost the same functionality as the standard API. ]

2. Support for the Midas or MSHTML editor API. This functionality allows us to make a part of the document editable--such an IFRAME--and contains a lot of functionality such as caret display and movement, basic editing and formatting, cut/copy/paste, undo/redo, etc.

Other important features would be stability and the possibility to debug JavaScript programs. Based on our experience, Safari and Opera have serious problems with the DHTML support--while it is OK for small applications like menus or roll-overs, a highly complex application like HTMLArea has little chance to work and, as one can easily imagine, a browser crash is almost impossible to debug.