How to keep clients from breaking sites?
Darren Hoyt wonders how we might both empower clients to edit their own sites, yet keep them from breaking the sites.
I believe that, eventually, this problem will be solved at the level of TinyMCE. I suspect we are 3 or 4 years away from that. I think eventually visual editors like TinyMCE and FCKEditor will have the same power as Dreamweaver has now. By that point, however, the Javascript libraries will be frighteningly bloated, so the future scenario I’m describing depends on faster computers, faster browsers, faster Javascript engines and faster download times (imagine sites with 8 or 9 megabytes of Javascript – I believe this is the future, even if it sounds freakish to us now).
All of the current valid criticisms of Dreamweaver will apply to the future visual Javascript powered editors, and new complaints will emerge, I’m sure. But aside from all that, I believe that clients will eventually be empowered to design much more freely than they can now, with the Javascript automatically fixing the errors the clients accidentally create. Empty tags, tags that don’t close, incorrect nesting of tags — all this can be fixed automatically. This, I believe, is what will happen in the long run. In the short run, I’m less sure of the path to take.