Back in 2000/2001.. floods of dotcoms were pushing out CMS systems into everybody else's face, and co-incidentally everybody else was looking for a CMS for their spanking new websites.

The company I was in even went as far as driving prices right down to 2000 RM (we were targeting M'sian market) per CMS powered website - First, capture the market share! Then, fleece them! Our intern-turn-full-time programmer was churning out a website every 3 days! Not too-complex sites of cos, but nevertheless it wasn't something I'd like to witness ever again - a programmer is no Shanghai assembly-line worker.

Anyways, during the era where "Content Is King", there is a common lack of good WYSIWYG editors usable by the average Joe customer. FrontPage? IE? Developers don't like no evil IE-only COM object embed in HTMLs - besides that COM object was doing more things wrong than right. And there's little you can do about it!

So, lame excuses has to be conjured to make a plain old textarea input more platable for the average joe who wants their website to look like CNN.

Fast forward 2003/2004.. I think Frederico (aka FredCK) saw that need and finally did a super cross-browser WYSIWYG editor - for FREE. Yes, even commercial products can use it.

I'd actually seen it few months back and was quite impressed already. However, only last night did I started appying it to my just-for-fun forum.. now I'm REALLY impressed at the ease of deployment. I'd only added a javascript snippet onto the page - without changing anything else - and I get a WYSIWYG editor in replacement of my original textarea. Kewl, I thought. But does it work? Do I have to jump hoops in my forum (programming) code? [Memories of dealing with the IE COM object suggested that I had to purposely code with the editor in mind, I could be wrong or inexperience then]

I clicked the submit button. It works. No code changes. I only need to add the same javascript to every page that I want the textarea converted to a HTML editor.

How much simpler can you get?