AniDB RTE

The AniDB Rich Text Editor
This page will try to explain the AniDB RTE and why it isn't your standard Rich Text Editor.

What is an RTE

A Rich Text Editor is a User Interface control that replaces a standard HTML textarea element; it allows for the rich formatting of text content, including common structural treatments like lists, or formatting treatments like bold and italic text. These formatting options are applied in real time, so that you get an immediate feedback on what you are doing. This is pretty much what you should be used to from using a word processing application like MS Word, Open Office Writer, etc.

How does an RTE work

An RTE is usually an html document within an iframe with the contentEditable attribute enabled which allows for the editing of the document in your browser, there is then a set of basic commands for doing basic commands, these basic commands are done via the document.execCommand command, stuff like bold, italic and so on are applied with this command, execCommand also has another functions to control how an RTE works.
The RTE interface was developed by Microsoft and ported to other browsers by their respective vendors, much like the xmlhttprequest function that is core of AJAX.

The content of the edited document is then sent by some way to the server, usually by an HTTP POST command, servers then store the content and after display it.

The problem is that vendors more or less follow specifications standards with some not respecting execCommands which control how the editor works. This makes coding an RTE a very complicated issue if one intends to support multiple browsers with lots of hacked in code to support/work-around browser quirks.

Every RTE has a lot of code, which can be either client, server-sided or both, to process the input, clean it up and adapt the data to the servers requirements.

The AniDB case

AniDB doesn't store html formatted content like many other sites do, AniDB had for a long time a kind of tags, much like to the phpBB forum, like [b]some bold text[/b] and so on.
Whenever you used one of these tags in a review or message or whatever those tags were then saved to the server and then parsed and converted to html content on display by the server, so the above text would be returned as "some bold text".

Supported tags

[b]...[/b] - bold text
[i]...[/i] - italic text
[u]...[/u] - underline
[s]...[/s] - line-trough style
[ul]...[/ul] - unordered lists
[ol]...[/ol] - ordered lists
[li]...[/li] - lists items (go inside both [ul] and [ol])
[quote]...[/quote] - quoted text without name
[quote=USERNAME]...[/quote] - quoted text with name referenced
[code]...[/code] - non-formatted text
[spoiler]...[/spoiler] - text is hidden; visibility of text can be toggled using "Show/Hide Spoiler" button
[url]HREF[/url] - link to URL where text is the same as the URL (can only be used to link AniDB domain URLs)
[url=HREF]...[/url] - link to URL where text is different from the URL (can only be used to link AniDB domain URLs)
[img]HREF[/img] - link to an image

Piece it all together

Now that you know all the commands/tags what really happens when you write something in the RTE is:

You type all the text you wish and apply all the formatting you wish
You press add/submit/send/whatever
Before your text is actually submitted to the server it will be parsed and known html commands will be converted to the AniDB format
Your text is submitted to the server

So whenever the parser tries to parse some html command and it doesn't find a match it will send the text as is to the server which will then convert it to plain and harmless text which will look but ugly in your review.

How can it go wrong

This is a run down of the most usual cases for the output to look like crap and most efficient solutions.

Known causes for text to be borked

You did a copy paste from word or some other editor
You did a copy paste from a site

What can you do to fix the output

First and most useful is before copy/pasting text from a text editor first paste it in "Mode: Advanced" to remove the underlying formats and then switch to "Mode: Visual" if needed.
Disable JavaScript and reload the page and use the normal textarea to clean up the content
Bug fahrenheit until he finds out what have you done wrong and solve the issue

Browser Support

Here is a list of the currently browser support and some notes about them:
For visual preview of the current browser support check this [forum thread].

Supported

Internet Explorer 7/8 - Can't correctly insert lists
Firefox/Gecko 2.0 - No issues
Opera 9.27 - Can't correctly insert lists
Safari/AppleWebKit 3.1 - No Issues

Not Supported

Any non-JavaScript enabled browser
Any browser that doesn't support document.contentEditable (i.e.: Opera 8)

Not tested by AniDB

Any other browser and or browser versions