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Tony Byrne

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Copy-Pasting Word to Your Web CMS

7-Jun-2011

Tags: Web Content and Experience Management, Implementation, Selecting Technology, Usability

It seems like once a year one of us at RSG gets motivated to write about rich text (a.k.a., WYSIWYG) editors. After more than a decade in the market and much innovation, they are still a constant source of confusion and frustration for content managers. Too many vendors assume that rich text editing is "commodity" feature, when alas, it is not.

One big area of confusion lies around pasting content from Word. Yes, many people still want to do this, often for good reason. I've been mentoring several of our research customers through vendor demos lately, and in a simulated environment, Word copy-paste can demo pretty well. It's in the real world that problems start cropping up.

Vendors talk a lot about differentiating features, but when copy-pasting Word to HTML, you really just have two broad choices:

1. Retain visual fidelity, which means passing Office-specific mark-up through to the page
2. Maintain pure HTML standard mark-up, which inevitably means losing at least some visual fidelity upon paste

You can see where this is going: contributors tend to prefer the former; web and IT managers prefer the latter.

Incidentally, this challenge is not limited to Word. Try pasting some marked-up content from Google Docs into your CMS rich text editor, then view source and check out the funky extra mark-up.

Some vendors try to work around this by offering the contributor different choices at paste-time, often reflected as different tiny icons in the editor toolbar. That sounds promising, but requires careful education, and will lead to inconsistent behavior on your rendered pages.

If you have to train your colleagues one way or another, then I'd typically recommend defaulting to clean-HTML and show people how to fix the formatting as necessary within the editor itself. Yes, this could lead to more help-desk calls ("the editor is broken!"), but the point is to satisfy site visitors, and they want clean, light, accessible, readable pages.

In our evaluations of 40+ Web CMS vendors, we pay very careful attention to the authoring and editorial interfaces. Far from a commodity, the contributor experience can actually represent key differentiators among the tools. You need to watch carefully for things like homegrown rich text editors -- a clear warning sign. Or, you can ask us to watch for you. Either way, assess your choices carefully.