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| ArchitectureMany readers will have used Microsoft FrontPage, Microsoft's primary web page authoring tool. FrontPage is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. This means that what you edit on the screen is basically the same as the web page that you will get at the end. For the technically minded it raises the question of why Microsoft went to the effort to create a special WYSIWYG editor version of Internet Explorer that is used only by FrontPage and then write another version of Internet Explorer for everyone else. It is not surprising to find that there is only one version of Internet Explorer that has two modes of operation. Firstly a 'browser' mode which is used at the moment to view this web page and a special 'editor' mode that is used by Frontpage and is also leveraged by this program; HTML Rich Text Area. By carefully mapping the HTML editing functionality provided by Internet Explorer running in this special mode across to a word processing model it has been possible to create a relatively sophisticated editing tool that runs within a web page. Even the most novice of users can feel immediately comfortable with the editor totally unaware that they are actually marking up HTML and effectively creating web pages. Under the hood the HTML Rich Text Area is several thousand lines of relatively complex javascript code. This means that HTML Rich Text Area runs totally on the client side. You may use any web server from Internet Explorer to Apache and HTML Rich Text Area will still work. In addition, Internet Explorer is marked 'safe for scripting' so HTML Rich Text Area will work with even the most restricted of security settings. HTML Rich Text Area by its nature will only fully work with Internet Explorer 5.01 or later. However, if it displayed in another browser then it will detect this and automatically degrade its own functionality so it appears as a simple textarea HTML form element. |
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