I should remember this incident!
Last week, we added a feature for the mailing system in our application. We replaced the html text area with rich text editor. We used the open source TinyMCE (http://tinymce.moxiecode.com).
The rich text formatting feature is a good thing to have. Although some of the customers asked for it as a suggestion, there was no pressure! To utilize developer time better, I asked my team mate to integrate rich text for the module I am in charge. He did it quick as he is a good developer. Here we violated one of the good design principles - we should not add things until it is really needed (YAGNI).
We thought not to support things like link, tables etc at the very beginning for security reasons. Testing phase ran for about 5 days, and we finally released it in production system. Then the real story began! Some of the users were not able to copy formatted text from word processors to our newly added rich text box. Even if there was no table pasted (we did not support table), but it was showing wrong message to users that there was a table in the rich text.
Further investigation revealed that, for a version of MS word processor and for a specific browser version, the text comes with some tags when it was pasted to the pop up of our rich text editor (users need to paste rich text to a pop up, then need to click on 'add' button to finally add the text to the base form - this pop up cleans up unsupported formatting/tags using regular expressions on users final action 'add'). Here, our cleanup regular expressions failed to catch the comment tags came from word process.
Then we fixed and released in production.
The next day, another user reported the same thing even if we had fixed the known problem. Again, further investigation revealed that for another word processor, when user copy formatted text which was center aligned, some special tags came along with it which our validator did not catch!
Moreover, the page loading time increased about 500 ms. Another users told that spell checker that comes with the browser, did not get enabled by default inside rich text box for Firefox and IE! This is because, the text area had been replaced by the rich text's iFrame.
Life sucks on such situations!
Finally, we decided, we should not support copy-paste rich text from other word editors since we don't know how MS and other word processors will come up with new formatted tags in future. Users will only allowed to paste text as 'plain' text - we will remove all kinds of tags for other text editors. Then, they may like to add formatting inside our rich text editor using the available tools on bar. Actually, this was the actual requirements I told the developer to implement!
We would have to implement this feature at some point in future - seems took the pain a bit earlier :-)
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