In a wildly optimistic move, I rolled out ^Edit v0.1.8 on the permalink pages of this blog. It’s still Ajaxian for the time-being (i.e. the most recent entries aren’t served up initially, but instead, are replaced onload) but you should now be able to amuse yourself correcting my grammar and prose, or defacing my hilarity. Don’t hurt yourself now 
Changes:
- Bug Fix: properly converts unicode characters to html entities for storage in the database and retrieval
- Bug Fix: insertion of "CoordinateHolders" no longer breaks HTML tags with UTF-8 characters
- Bug Fix: if there is no wiki history for a region, it doesn’t wipe out the HTML in that region to display a default message (unless its blank)
Demo v0.1.8 (Mozilla/Firefox, IE, Safari)
FYI, it doesn’t work in Firefox 1.5 Beta 1, aka. Firefox 1.4 (clicking on it gives JS error).
It doesn’t work properly in Internet Explorer 6SP2 as well. e.g caret disappear, left/right arrow doesn’t move the caret, etc.
T|his is pretty good for a stating place if anyone wants to develop a WYSIWYG editor using this as a basic framework
Love the idea of using AJAX to submit and retrieve content – Nice and slick compared to most WYSIWYG editors available today.
Just some test text for editing. Try adding BOLD and ITALICS (Ctrl-I) as you type.
One problem, once the text has been entered, you can`t assign BOLD or Italics to the text using the highlight facility.
Also, the cursor insertion moves the text slightly and may not be easy to see – maybe simply inverse/reset the current character color and bg color to make the active cursor position `flash` (just an idea).
Implementing a Home/End key would be a nice simple touch as well as correcting bugs with the up/down arrows.
Dragonlaird
Hey Dragonlaird, thanks for all the feedback. The highlight ability is a good idea; I think that shouldn’t be too hard to take care of (in IE/Firefox at least — might be impossible in Safari).
A flashing cursor is a neat idea. I think I’m going to add that for sure
Development really hasn’t gone forward on ShiftEdit for the last year (check the timestamps — I know, it’s suxors) but I really hope to keep this project alive this year. As far as I know, it’s still the only true WYSIWYG HTML editor out there
I’ve even gone as far as to integrate it into my WhyYouShould.org project. You wouldn’t have any VC, would you? 
Anyhow, thanks for the words of encouragement!
Programming Tutorials…
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…
Also, the cursor insertion moves the text slightly and may not be easy to see – maybe simply inverse/reset the current character color and bg color to make the active cursor position `flash` (just an idea).
Implementing a Home/End key would be a nice simple touch as well as correcting bugs with the up/down arrows.