racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

Max Limpag writes on Xinha Here!, a nifty Firefox 1.5 extension (yes, version 1.5 and above only) that converts your textarea into a what you see is  what you get (WYSIWYG) editor.

This extension is great for bloggers–or other online content creators/editors–who use textarea-type editors like the WordPress default, but would like to try out WYSIWYG for a change (unfortunately, some hosted blogging providers do not let users easily switch between plaintext and WYSIWYG/RTE).

Well, Xinha Here! doesn’t exactly replace the textarea outright, since the app brings up a new window upon activation from the context menu (content in the source textarea will be picked up for editing, if already present).  It’s better in a way, because it doesn’t interfere with Firefox’s normal operation, unless explicitly called for.

You even get advanced options like “remove all Microsoft formatting tags” (to clean up all those unecessary, scattered tags that appear on Firefox if an article was copied and pasted from Word) and a “page cleaner” that removes all HTML formatting.

You can always toggle across HTML source and RTE when you feel old school.

At any rate, I’m using it right now, and I can say it works like a charm.  It’s fast, it’s light, and it simply works.

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