HTML compose on /beta/
 

Hi everyone.

You should be able to use HTML compose on www.fastmail.fm/beta/ now. There's a drop down list over on the right, under the buttons, that lets you select the edit mode.

Some issues:
- We don't autodetect the editing mode when you reply to a message. You have to select the appropriate item from the "Prefix >" drop down list.
- you may have to force a reload, as some javascript has changed - ctrl-f5 for IE, I think
- At the moment we're using HTMLArea as the actual HTML compose widget. This may change in the future.
- The screen layout is a bit ugly at the moment, I'll be working on that. Suggestions are welcome (the mode: x body: x will disappear from the title soon).
- I'm told that at the moment, quoting bars don't appear for <blockquote>s when using IE. I'm also looking into that
- There's apparently a security warning when using IE for HTML mode. I'm looking into that, too.

(It seems like I might have to dust off the old windows box to do some testing)

Please send any ideas / feedback to support at rjlov dot fastmail dot fm, or post them somewhere around here.

Enjoy!

Richard.

Fantastic Richard! Looks like you've been hard at work since the File Storage. :)

Just some minor things after a quick look see. The typing is very dark. Looks bold even though it isn't. After typing a few lines I decided to narrow the compose screen with the little <<. This lost all the typing. Paste from Clipboard isn't working. Insert image can only be inserted from a URL? (not your HD). And, last but not least, where's the "Smilies"? :)

Great Job :)

Sherry

EDIT: IE6, WinME

&nbsp;
Nice work. FM seems to be on a roll here...keep going :) .

woo hoo......

(typing message in beta server while jumping around the living room) :p

Hmm it freezes up when I ask it to compose in HTML>.......but otherwise very nice!!

Robin

If you have bug reports folks, please include your browser name and version, and your operating system name and version, and the sequence of steps which triggers the bug.

Siganture/Personality doesn't seem to get attached?? Otherwise a 5 minute play seems fine.

That's awesome.

One issue though. I use IE to logon to FM in secure mode. When I change the edit mode from text to html, it will display a confirmation box about the web page containing both secure and insecure items. Is it possible to avoid this?

Thanks! Keep up the good work!

Not working:

Using Opera 7.23 on Windowx XP Professional, Build 2600 with SP1 and all patches applied.

Problem: After 'OK'ing the 'you may lose formatting'-dialog it keeps on loading the new page. It has been doing that for 3 minutes now, so I doubt it's a connection thing.

Confirm the not-a-connection-problem, since it does load properly in the Infernal Explorer.

--K

I can confirm that Opera (7.5b2 or 7.5b3 on WXP) doesn't do the HTML widget. If I manually add a <strong /> piece of text, it's sent out properly, though.

-b

I just checked out the new HTML editor. I must say, it looks quite nice! I have a couple of questions, though:

1) In the HTML editor, there's a button with two squares and an arrow, with "Enlarge Editor" as its tool tip. When I click that, a new window opens with the title "Fullscreen HTMLArea" that contains nothing except a blank text area, with no controls of any kind. What's the point of this button?

2) There's a button marked <>, tool tip "Toggle HTML Source" that allows editing of the raw HTML source. There's also an option under the Edit As: menu marked "Raw HTML" that completely gets rid of the HTML widget and goes back to the normal text editor, but allows HTML tags. Why do we need both of these options, and what's the advantage of using one over the other? Is the Raw HTML option just there for browsers that can't display the widget, or is there some other advantage to using it vs. the button in the HTML editor?

3) If I use the Insert/Modify Image button, that's to link an external image, right? Could I use this button to insert a link to an image that I was attaching to the message? If so, how?

Just tried it out in Mozilla Firefox 0.8 and looks great
Cheers

Tried to colour some text I'd written with the text colour button. My entire window resized to the colour select box size and didn't resize to normal after selecting blue.
(On manually enlarging the window I saw that text went to blue successfully)

(using Mozilla 1.6 on Linux)

False alarm - retrying this I see it's the popup window being opened in a new tab and resizing the window. Only yesterday I'd changed the TabBrowser Extension to open all new windows including popups in their own tab (because creating and closing new windows seems to take too long - about 10sec usually while tab creation is instantaneous). Guess this can be put down to my configuration rather than any problem eith the HTML editor.

Mostly it looks good. I haven't got a lot to compare it to because I generally send HTML mail. However, it looks like it could be a handy tool for just creating a little HTML on the fly, too. This is something that might come in very handy from time to time.

One thing: using Mozilla Firefox I can't enter any text into the javascript dialogue boxes for URL or for IMG.