Page Hacker Revived

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от contulmmiv Ноя. 3, 2014 · permalink

Many thanks, Dormines, for your addon - the only WYSIWYG inline editor for Firefox, whose absence is one of the incomprehensible blunders of Firefox administration...

Back in the 1990s, WYSIWYG editing and annotating a web page, and switching between original and edited version, took as much pain as moving between two windows (or was it tabs?) in Netscape Composer. Two decades later, there still does not exist a similar ease and convenience of use, in the form of a WYSIWYG inline editor, in the legitimate inheritor of the Mozilla code, Firefox... The official Firefox leadership 'blessed' the users with personae, Australis and others bells and whistles; while the developer community is asleep in the wake of the leadership... There abound 'text-area' editors, but the difference is the same as that between writing a comment in a niggardly box (as the one provided for this review), as opposed to an inviting, full white page... The situation is no better with offline (standalone) WYSISYG editors: between the old and no longer developed KompoZer, and the mozilla-based, semi-commercial Blue Griffon, there isn't much to chose from...

First, beginning in 2003, there was Mozile by James A. Overton/Max d'Ayala (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mozile/?src=search), a real WYSIWYG editor for Firefox 2. It died in 2008, when the transition to Firefox 3 occurred (see my observations on MozDev, http://www.mozdev.org/pipermail/mozile/2008-August/001317.html).
Then, in 2010, there came Edit&Note by Valeria Gyengye (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/edit-and-note/; see my review here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/edit-and-note/reviews/208111/). It came, and gone: a year later, it succumbed to changes in the Firefox code.

Then, in 2012, Page Hacker Revived appeared. It is a complete disgrace for the addons.mozilla.org team that 2 years later the addon is still marked as 'experimental' and 'preliminary reviewed'.
After several months of use, here are a couple of observations:

1. This addon is much more than Page Hacker, from whom it has taken its name. Apart from allowing the annotation of a webpage, for which a number of solutions exist (Edit Page addon, whichstill works with a hacked xpi: see here my review, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/edit-page/reviews/574418; solutions using the html5 attribute contenteditable, see https://coderwall.com/p/lhsrcq), PH Revived offers the complete basic set of tools for WYSIWYG editing. The name should reflect this richness of functions.
2. The toolbar reopens after browser restart if it was closed from the 'x' button on the extreme right. It stays closed only if the toolbar is disabled from the menu 'View->Toolbars'. Probably this behavior should be changed such as the toolbar stays closed. This would mean that launching the toolbar should be based on a button/menu, instead of relying on the enabling/disabling of the toolbar from the View menu of Firefox.
3. The dropdown menus (font, size, block elements) do not function correctly. Font menu: after applying a different font to a selection of text, the display area of the menu remains blank, while it should revert back to the default font used in the text; also, once a font has been chosen for typing, its name should be displayed in the visible area. Size menu: once the menu is used, it displays size '1' indifferent to which actual font size is used. Heading menu: similarly, once the menu is used, if displays heading '1' indifferent to which text style is used.
4. The block elements menu should imperatively include 'paragraph' (and perhaps 'div').
5. Anchors and the capacity to link to them from within the document would bring the addon closer to the functionality of an editor.
6. Desirable features to be added: button switch between html view and code view; loading and editing of css stylesheets.

For purposes of illustration, to me, the most desirable usages are as follows: annotation and editing of web pages in conjunction with Scrapbook captures; writing de novo of notes in html; preparation, reading and annotations of epubs (which are essentially zipped htmls)(for the preparation approach, access to code view, stylesheet, and full Regex search/replace functionality would be needed).

I very much hope that this addon will receive the attention it deserves and that the author will continue supporting it across the vicissitudes of the Firefox development.