ActivEdit is the Incarnation of Absolute Evil

If you are looking for a WYSIWYG editor to embed into one of your web applications, heed this warning: stay far and clear away from ActivEdit or any derivation thereof. I understand that WYSIWYG editors are designed for people who have no design skills, or knowledge of the internet, but does this has to come at the expense of clean code and semantic markup? The product website boasts that ActivEdit is used by huge corporations and top government agencies, including NASA! I’ll tell you this, NASA is great at developing expensive space exploration programs, but they cannot pick web software for shit.

Here are some of the exciting features of ActivEdit:

• Converts all your code to nearly unreadable HTML 4.0 circa 1996! All tags are uppercased, attributes are stripped of their quotations and rearranged, any attempt at making code readable though the source editor using line breaks or tabs will be denied with the anger of hades. It’s like they took web standards and reversed them for their own non-sensical purposes.
• Built in image browser supports one level of organization! Watch as all your image get lost in an extremely long alphabetical list of meaningless filenames. Truly useless. Also, try uploading files with the same filename. Another fun bug is uploading an image with an uppercase extension, like file.GIF. It is rejected as “not an image file”.
• Strips all style tags, JavaScript, or any other advanced web trickery in order to make your web page as crappy as possible. You can use inline styles in the source view, but there is no way to edit those styles in the WYSIWYG mode. Welcome to Font Tag City, population ActivEdit.
• Did I mention the code it produces is vomit inducing? Each time you edit an element, it adds more and more layers of formatting tags, empty DIVs, and improperly nested elements. It doesn’t clean up after itself, like a very very bad dog.

On the upside, the editor does make it incredibly easy for unsuspecting business users to create completely abominable, inaccessible, uneditable and downright ugly web pages in less than 10 minutes.

Just a suggestion, if you are looking for a good visual editor for your application, stay far away from this one and instead try one of these gems.

• FCKEditor
• TinyMCE