As users demand increasingly desktop-like features from Ajax Web sites, developers must rely on sophisticated, third-party user interface components. Rich text editors are a frequently employed UI component category. Web consultancy WebDistortion reviews nine text editor components in a recent article, 9 of the best Rich Text editors reviewed.

The components range from basic editors that provide minimal WYSIWYG formatting, to all-inclusive word processor-like widgets that provide file upload and, in some cases, even a calendar for blog posts. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the most feature-rich editors are available under permissive open-source licenses. The WebDistortion article reviews the following text editors:

• NiceEdit:

  NicEdit was created over the past month as an alternative for the complexity, many files and large download size (> 200KB) of other WYSIWYG editors such as TinyMCE and FCKEditor...Unfortunately it has yet to provide XHTML cleanup, so there is still scope for your users to generate poor non compliant HTML out of it, potentially making your W3C validator choke, and potentially vomit up your code.

• Kupu:

  Uses CSS in favor of HTML for layout and presentation. It supports asynchronous saving to the server. It sets event handlers from code instead of from the HTML (excepting the toolbar), which makes the code a lot cleaner. It uses DOM functionality to build up HTML. On those and other fronts it tries to use the most modern standardized techniques available on all supported browsers to ensure a good user-experience and clean code.

• TinyMCE:

  TinyMCE follows the payment model that alot of other Rich Text Editors do, give the editor for free and bolt on image and file manager elements at a cost. Other than that the features are extremely rich, and it can be configured to work in XHTML mode. The documentation is also pretty comprehensive for both features.

• Kevin Roth RTE:

  Whilst Rich Text Editor has been around for ages, the development has gone a bit stale and it still feels a bit basic, both in terms of skinning and features. The code is also quite heavy, although generates XHTML code

• FCKEditor:

  Image upload out of the box, content layout templates, styles support, XHTML valid features. I simply cant fault this one. Adobe AIR support!

• Yahoo UI Editor:

  Although it is still in beta, the result so far looks extremely impressive, and I for one would be comfortable using it in a commercial application. It uses fully object orientated javascript libraries with classes than can be extended if you know what you are doing. It comes with partial image support (via URLS not uploads) , but an interesting sample on the site shows how to integrate a flickr image search, and an integrated calendar which would be useful in the blogging world.

• WebWiz RichTextEditor:

  Their Rich Text editor isn’t free, and why anyone would purchase it when the host of options I have just talked about are available for free...

• CodePlex Rich Text Editor:

  The aim of the codeplex editor is to encapsulate everything you need into a single control, drop a dll in the bin folder and away you go (more or less). Unfortunately the control isn’t feature rich enough to warrant every .net project going down this route, and due to the source code spitting out old HTML (font tags etc) it isn’t really an option for standards compliant design companies (such as ourselves)

• XStandard:

  The editor generates clean XHTML Strict or 1.1, and uses CSS for formatting, to ensure the clean separation of content from presentation. The editor is keyboard accessible, and markup generated by XStandard meets the most demanding accessibility requirements. The editor’s cool features include drag & drop file upload, spell checking and an image library that integrates tightly with your CMS.

What is your favorite rich text editor?