Should users be allowed to copy and paste rich text into text?

Question

I have a wiki-style application where users can create articles. Recently, some users have been complaining that our editor does not support copying rich text and formatting from applications like Microsoft Word, Excel, or certain web browsers.

The reason I don't want to add support for that (I actually purposely disabled the 'feature') is because of how dirty the submitted input is. When copying from Microsoft Word for example, lots of HTML tags are added.

Am I wrong in disabling this? What are the pros/cons of enabling or disabling rich copy&paste.

Answer 1

The question you need to ask is:

Will enabling pasting of rich text add value to my application?

Will it add more users? Will it help retain users? Will it make them more productive? etc.

If the answer is "yes" then you need to weigh that against the cost - which in this case is the effort required to sanitise the input and the cost of not sanitising the input and having "dirty" text in your database or losing customers.

If the sum comes out positive then you should implement this feature.

Enabling the pasting of rich text will improve the UX - the user won't necessarily have to do anything more to their text to get it appearing how they like, as it will already be formatted to their satisfaction. There won't be the additional "reformat" step that your current implementation has. Of course, some users will want the ability to paste as plain text and reformat so the feature must be optional.

Answer 2

In the web application I work with, pasting of Office material caused some significant issues (including embedded stylesheets that broke the entire page). But this is not an indictment of pasting actually... my recommendation is to allow pasting. But post-process the HTML submitted and remove all but allowed HTML tags. In particular, make sure to strip mso attributes, <style>, and <script> tags. I personally would go farther; remove all but very select basic HTML tags (<p>, <h?>, <strong>, <b>, <ul>, <li>, <br/>, etc) and clear all style, id, and class attributes completely.

This will allow you to paste in the HTML, but requests for specific fonts, margins, divs, spans and such will be removed. The formatting that is lost can easily be replaced if necessary, and this will (by default) cause all pasted content to conform to the standard stylesheet.

Exactly where you draw the line for allowed content is up to you, but I have found this to be an excellent alternative to wholesale blocking of formatting that usually pleases both parties. The only significant loss that I've seen with this method is paragraph options (margins, line spacing) and fonts... but I believe the end result (consistently formatted content) is superior because of this loss.

Answer 3

In general I think this is an example of the client describing their required solution not their problem. I presume, for instance, that the client uses Word to typeset web content because of a few useful features, like WYSIWYG, "Track Changes" and the ability to send around a document for discussion.

It's my guess (and it's only a guess, since it depends on your customer in this instance), that what they really need is the tool to develop over time to allow them to do their content drafting in the wiki itself, showing them a live preview of all type treatments, giving them flexible draft states to permit easy discussion and review and potentially even a nice "diff" interface to get something like "Track Changes" working in the web app.

All that may be overkill, mind you. The simplest issue here is figuring out a way to avoid Word doing its automatic pasteboard stuff that converts the copied text to HTML when pasted in a contentEditable field on the web. If you can get the input more-or-less in RTF format, the extent of the crazy formatting tags should be reduced.

Answer 4

I agree with your decision, however, if your users truly need the formatting, you should enable it.

For example, I built an application to help recruit for product research studies. The messages sent out for clinical studies had to be reviewed and approved, and had to be sent out with the same styling and formatting as approved, i.e. a bold red title that defined not to eat for 24hrs before coming to the study.

I used TinyMCE to enable this, but it was still a headache, and it was very inconsistent, despite what many people think of it's 'auto-formatting from Word' capabilities. :)

Answer 5

Here are a few pros:

• Copy and paste is a very heavily used feature - for example it is the single most often used Microsoft Word command.
• Your application's rich-text formatting may be good, but honestly it won't be as good as MS Word. Certainly to most users who already know how to do word-processing in MS Word, and don't want to have to learn a new tool to do the same job.
• Your application may support rich-text formatting; but unless the users can paste in formatted text, they will have to do it from scratch in every single article.
• even if it's not the user themself doing the formatting in MS Word, they may be transcribing the information (including formatting) given them by someone else. If you don't let them paste the formatted text, they'll have to redo all that work.