2004/12/3
Edit It! Enhanced Blog Editing Experiment...
EditIt! has been retired. You can now click directly on the <HTML> toolbar button to switch the editor into HTML mode.
First, I must say some of our user's are way too smart
. I must give credit for this trick to Phil Harvey who has his own .NET Blog.
The rich text editor (or RTE for short), is a component (I wrote 5 years ago!) currently used by Hotmail, MSN Groups, and now Spaces for posting rich content. It was designed with a configurable toolbar for turning on and off different formatting options. Well, as Phil found out and sent us a note, you can execute Javascript on the address bar against the current page. He was able to turn back "on" some of the formatting commands that were disabled. (I am not going to try and explain why certain commands have been turned off).
So, rather than have Phil keep this a secret, I turned his simple trick into a new "Edit It" toolbar button (click here to get it). Consider this button completely unsupported and experimental (it may stop working at any time). When adding a blog entry, clicking this button will reenable a couple of the toolbar options and turn on a checkbox where you can edit your raw HTML. Before you get overly excited, we support a very small subset of HTML so there are no guarantees that the HTML you type (or generated by these new buttons) will render.
Please enjoy this toolbar button and keep the feedback coming - we are listening!
(and don't forget to check out the Blog It! toolbar button I posted earlier)