i agree that the wordpress visual editor and html editor are quite clunky although I do like certain aspects of them.
In particular, placing images in your post and having them go where you want can be an annoying task. I just recently encountered the problem with the “spacer_”, even when I’m using html view only.
the thing I like about wordpress is that it seems to be continually evolving so i’m sure that all the wysiwyg faults and text-editor problems that currently exist on wordpress will be slowly improved.
