iPhone support?

mmmmmh, sorry... but this is the wrong location to ask this question. I don't really know a better, but your favorite search engine might help, too. ;)

Hi
I totally support the request / query which should be addressed by any wysiwyg éditor i believe

It seems very hard to trigger the "design mode" (contenteditable) on iPhones. I looked around for a while how to work around this, but nobody seems to have a solution. Without that, you won't get any of the "real" WYSIWYG editors to run...

I just got to borrow the iPhone my girlfriend won a little over a year ago and tested almost all the supported editors in it. Triggering contentEditable seemed to work fine as all the editors loaded and looked fine, but it was impossible to interact with any of them. The iPhone does not recognize elements with contentEditable as actually editable. Disabling rich text editing did work and then I was able to input things in the original textarea, and it showed up when an editor was enabled again.

Navigating around the editors on that small screen was a bit painful. I could not see the entire editor toolbar clearly at once and it would probably have been very hard to navigate or scroll inside the editing area as well if I could have put much text in there.
I asked my girlfriend what she thought of it, as I know she sometimes visits forums on that thing, and she said it's pretty much hopeless to try to post longer messages. Either the browser crashes/freezes, the erase button hangs or its simply too frustrating to work with. She's thinks that for a high-tech tool it has too many basic problems. She hasn't tried the update(s) Apple released to finally add some of those features other phones have had for years, but doubts it will help much based on what others have written (and she couldn't begin the update process due to browser issues).

It's starting to look like the small-mobile-devices-market is not a big target for WYSIWYG developers due to browser and/or platform limitations. Personally, I really hope people will not start adding quirky platform specific code to support these devices or we'll have the old browser wars all over again. I do hope the mobile browsers catch up to current standards and work together to create new, 'official', standards before all that. The device manufacturers have been able to agree on using the mini USB connector for charging (which is at least something), so the the platforms might also get more compatible in the future.

For now, WYSIWYG editing seems pretty much dead on the iPhone (and Android based platforms), but I'd love to hear if other platforms are better at this.

So why is it that the WYSIWYG editor contained in vBulletin works so well with the iPhone/iPad? I really have become tired of the inability of FCKEditor to allow proper copy-paste of Word docs from mobile Webkit browsers. I don't expect to be upload photos but some basic functionality would be nice.

If I'm not mistaken, the editor in vBulletin isn't a real WYSIWYG editor (it doesn't have a 'design' mode). It's basically just a textarea with a toolbar for inserting markup strings into the textarea. Mobile browsers don't have any issues with this as to them it's just a regular textarea, while divs or iframes with contentEditable set are not considered as input fields and won't trigger a caret or accept character input.

Textareas also won't have any issues with pasting content from Word, as it's not Word's terrible HTML markup being pasted but the alternate text/plain representation automatically added to the clipboard in parallel to the copied HTML fragment. In that case, the editor doesn't need to clean up the messy markup generated by Word as Word itself already put the text/plain version in the clipboard. When pasting into a contentEditable element, the browser notices the element is part of a HTML DOM, so it'll use the "HTML text" variant of the clipboard data, and we get a mess in the editor.

As different versions of Word, and different OSs, create different markup the editors have a very hard time fixing it all.
OpenOffice is often much better at generating HTML markup which can be pasted, but will still leave comments and styles here and there, simply because these documents don't always translate well to HTML.
In either case, using the editor's "paste as plain text" should have the same effect as pasting in the vBulletin editor, if you could get and move the caret to where you want the content to be...

Any new action on this? Would be great to have even simple wysiwyg controls in iPhone/iPad

I don't know about iPad or the latest iPhone, but all the devices before them are unable to recognize editable elements as... well, editable. That is not a problem with the editors or Wysiwyg module, it's with the mobile browsers. I've yet to come across one that can handle this.

Editors which use the a regular textarea for input should still work as the browsers can recognize them as editable, though they will not be able to do WYSIWYG stuff.

Marking as duplicate of #961522: WYSIWYG on mobile devices. - the discussion is not limited to Apple's iPhone.