WebKit nightly builds now offer Gmail rich text
Friday, April 27th, 2007
Anthony Baker emails to tell me that the new nightly builds of WebKit 
(which will be used for Safari 3.0) have fixed the WYSIWYG form editing problem that bedevils users of current Safari versions.
This means, he says, that “you can now hit Gmail and get the same kinds of rich-text editing capability provided to IE, FF and other browsers. You can also access Google Docs.”
And it’s true. Using Safari 2.0.4 (419.3) the formatting bar in Gmail’s basic HTML view doesn’t appear:
But WebKit displays the HTML formatting bar in all its glory (as it also does in Google Docs):
Not only that but some basic formatting keyboard shortcuts work too. So ⌘B and ⌘I toggle bold and italic text, making it easier for die-hard keyboard users to format their emails without fingers leaving the keyboard.
Not all the shortcuts work though. Tab+Enter doesn’t send a message and ⌘U doesn’t produce underlined text.
The latest beta of the much-hyped Desktop client for Gmail, MailPlane which I have been fooling around with for a few days also offers the option to use WebKit behind the scenes to give users this added functionality (but that’s a topic for another longer post.)
WebKit scolds you for daring to use extensions, but that’s a small price to pay for a user in love with Gmail’s HTML features.
[Thanks, Anthony!]
Tags: Apple Mail, formatting, GMAIL, Google, HTML, mail.app, mailplane, Safari, web forms, WebKit
