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I have a web application that uses TinyMce to allow rich text editing. Some of my customers are desperate to get it to work on iPad (which doesn't support contenteditable and therefore TinyMce doesn't work)

At the moment the only choices I have are:

  • Disallow rich text editing when i detect the browser is iPad. This is not much of a solution because my app relies heavily on rich text editing
  • Wait for iPad to support contentEditable
  • Write my own iPad app. This isn't really workable because it's a big complex app with loads of HTML and javascript and I would have to rewrite it all
  • Use another browser. As far as I know none of the other browsers support contenteditable either.

I'm really keen to find some workable solution. is there such thing as a rich text editor that doesn't require contenteditable? or does anyone have a clever idea I hadn't thought of?

Thanks in advance


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Is your application to distribute within an organization or App Store? If you distribute it privately there are some alternatives using the private APIs. Please let us know. –  sw. Dec 13 '10 at 3:07
yes the application will be distributed privately –  Andy Dec 15 '10 at 13:28
As far as I can see, <textarea> is working on IPad. This means, you need some kind of button to "enable editing", then switch for example <p>Test</p> with <textarea>Test</Textarea> and then somehow save this change... going to try this now. Any comments about this? Is it possible? –  zyrex Oct 11 '11 at 8:49

3 Answers 3

As of June 2011, it looks like there may be support coming in iOS 5


this observation (that it's working in the beta) has been confirmed by a colleague of mine too.

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Not necessarily true. You can embed the working part of your web app in a UIWebView component, which is basically Safari embedded in your app, and handle the not working part in the app (providing content). It would require work for sure, but maybe a lot less than rewriting the whole app for iPad.

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Thanks JV this sounds like a really interesting option. What I would need is some way for the web page running in the UIWebView to invoke the host application in some way (so that I can launch a native rich-text editing component). do you know if there is any way to do this? –  Andy Sep 27 '10 at 8:23
The UIWebViewDelegate protocol allows you to hook some ObjectiveC before the WebView handles a load request. That could do what you want. On the other side, UIWebView supports executing some Javascript from the ObjectiveC code, very useful too. –  jv42 Sep 27 '10 at 8:33
FYI someone pointed me at this link: codingventures.com/2008/12/using-uiwebview-to-render-svg-files under "Javascript communicating back with Objective-C code" it shows a workaround for invoking some Objective C code from JS. Unfortunately it looks like this project is being delayed so I won't be getting to play with iPad apps for the time being but I thought the link might be useful for anyone else interested in the same area –  Andy Sep 28 '10 at 12:31
Yes that was the method I was suggesting above about the delegate, used (and abused) to pass some info back and forth. –  jv42 Sep 28 '10 at 12:40

At to this point there are no browsers on the ipad that will allow RTE. Actually there is only one phone giving full browser support for RTE (sry, i forgot the name of the phone). Therefor, i think you almost showed all possible solutions (jv42's suggestion excluded) yourselve.

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