Why did we remove some of the tools in the editor?
We recently made a long overdue change to the content management system editor (that thingy that lets you type in content for publishing too your web site), and I thought it would be a good time to explain why certain options you might be used to are missing from the toolbar.
The editor toolbar as you know it currently looks like this:
Of the items we've removed are, these are probably the ones you're wondering about the most:
- Font Family
- Font colour
- Font size
- Background colour
- Underline
There is a good reason for this decision, and believe it or not having these tools gone will make it easier to keep your web site looking right. Here are the reasons for each of these tools not being included in the editor.
Font Family
The font family option lets you change the fonts of any part of your content. This means there is high potential that you can deface the look of your site by including non-standard fonts (fonts that don't appear on different platforms), and also ruining the aesthetic flow.
Our designers have already created a style sheet (a system that controls the look and feel of your web site), so there is no need for you to have to specify what font to use. Too easy.
Font colour, Font size and Background colour
For nearly the same reasons as the Font family explanation above, these options make it too easy to deface the look and feel of your web site, and painfully difficult for you to undo. This looks unprofessional and also violates W3C web standards which can have undesirable effects on your web site.
Underline
Perhaps the most significant omission is the underline tool, and for a very good reason. On web pages, one of the most common usability expectations is that when text is underlined it means you can click on it. This is a fundamental basic foundation upon which the original browser based web was built, and it is still in use today. By default, designers will make sure that all text links in your pages are automatically underlined, so your clients know what they can interact with.
The problem with providing an underline option in the editor is that people tend to use it to emphasise text, like they might in a word document example. When displayed on a web page, real links and underlined text looks the same, and when users try and click on the underlined text and realise nothing happens, this situation casts doubt on the integrity of every other link on your site. Essentially, usability is compromised.
On a physical document, underlines are perfectly acceptable as forms of emphasis, but on a web page they are not. For web pages, we have bold and underline to satisfy that need.