New toolbar, AJAX saving, and other fixes for the post editor

Today we’ve released a few enhancements to the new post editor, fixed some bugs, created a new one or two, and left a handful of things to fix later.

New Stuff

• AJAX save. We’re still not saving posts automatically, but now the “Save Now” button will keep the post editor open, and Ctrl-S works as a shortcut for saving. (Internet Explorer users: use Ctrl-Shift-S to save.)


• New toolbar. This toolbar looks better, loads more quickly, and has undo and redo buttons. By popular demand, the full justification button has returned. We’ve also added a strike through button and improved the color palettes.
  
  


• Vertical resizing. You can now change the height of the post editor by dragging the resize handle in the lower right (near the labels field). The size is saved in a per-user, per-blog preference.

Fixed Bugs

• <div>s in Edit HTML are now better-preserved in Compose mode. This should fix most post summary hacks. If your hack uses <span> tags, please switch to using <div>s.


• Lists created in Compose mode can now have new items added to them after switching to Edit HTML and back.


• Line breaking is no longer lost when editing a post in the old editor that was first written in the new editor.


• Nested block-level elements no longer create odd blank lines.


• Non-breaking spaces now consistently appear as &nbsp; in Edit HTML mode.

New Bugs (that we know about)

• The publish and save buttons wrap oddly on Mac browsers.

Major Remaining Bugs (that we know about)

• The Font Size menu has 4 sizes instead of 5, and “normal” looks small.


• Paragraph tags are lost when switching from Edit HTML to Compose.


• The Blockquote button still behaves oddly, especially in Internet Explorer.


• The URL an image links to cannot be changed without using Edit HTML mode.


• Images inserted with this editor do not pick up border styles from the blog template.


• Inserting a new link with the link dialog loses your place in the post. 

Find anything else? See: How to report HTML bugs with the new post editor



Things Left To Add

• Toolbar in Edit HTML mode


• Autosave


• Spellcheck


• Video upload


• FTP image upload


• Bi-directional text input and Indic transliteration 


• and a handful of smaller things too numerous to include here

How to report HTML bugs with the new post editor

We’d like to thank everyone who has been trying out the new post editor on Blogger in Draft and putting it through its paces. As many of you have noticed, the new editor handles HTML somewhat differently from the old editor, and tricks and conventions you may be used to are not working or screwing up your post’s formatting.

We would like to fix as many inconsistencies and problems as we can before we unleash the new editor on all Blogger users, so we’d really appreciate reproducible bug reports when you see a problem.

The three key pieces of a helpful bug report are:

• “I typed/clicked/did…”
• “I expected to see…”
• “What I really saw was…”

For example:

My post template is:

<span id="fullpost">
Full post
</span>

I opened up a new post in Firefox on XP and typed two paragraphs in Compose mode. When I switched back to Edit HTML, I expected to see:

<span id="fullpost">

First paragraph

Second paragraph

</span>

But what I saw was:

<span id="fullpost">
First paragraph</span>


<span id="fullpost">
Second paragraph</span>

Comments on this post are a fine place for these bug reports, or, if you post them on a blog, just link to them from the comments.

We realize that writing about HTML can be tricky in the post editor or the comments form. You can replace “<” with “&lt;” or put a space right after the “<” to prevent the editor from treating it as HTML. Or, if you make the post with the new editor, you can turn on “Show HTML literally” in the Compose Settings section of the Post Options.

While we can’t commit to making the new editor work exactly like the old in every regard (if we did, that might break some of the new useful features, such as drag-and-drop image placement), we really want to keep the differences down to as few as possible. Your feedback and bug reports will make this possible.

Thanks in advance!