In several recent projects we attempted to replace Tinymce as the leading content editor of choice with the much simpler Nicedit. We did not have any great need for the advanced features Tinymce offers and were looking for a much smaller, easier, faster tool.

While I’ve used nicedit before in basic situations and had no problems, I encountered several fatal issues which caused us to revert to Tinymce.

Inner-DIV Implementation
Nicedit creates a new DIV element that relies on some newer HTML features to work properly. Multiple issues stemmed from this, but the primary problem was that all CSS from parent elements would cascade into the DIV, thus forcing me to reset or modify some of them.

Tinymce uses an iframe which is a completely new document, so all CSS does not filter through. This also helps avoid the following content problems.

API
When ajax load/save techniques were used, there were problems with how Nicedit would copy it’s content back to the textarea, thus requiring extra programming. The API documentation is not that great, so it was a little difficult.

Elements Used
In firefox, Nicedit would use a different set of markup elements than it would in IE, making the output harder to predict. This issue is partly due to the use of the Inner-DIV and contenteditable attribute. When filtering the input for markup, we had to allow for both sets of elements. In firefox, the elements were all SPANs with style attributes, which isn’t anywhere near semantic.

Firefox LI Bug
Instances of the editor inside of a list item would have a fatal problem with newlines. While you could type alphanumeric characters, newline key presses would have no result. This was a fatal problem that took some time to debug, but it’s been filed and is awaiting resolution.

Obviously, nicedit is a lot less powerful and has a much smaller community. While it works well for quick needs, nicedit just didn’t work for more standard uses, and we found tinymce a much better solution despite it’s bulk. Since then I’ve managed to weed out a lot of tinymce code we weren’t using, optimize it like crazy, and create some custom plugins for it.