The Rich Text Editor is a UI control that replaces a standard HTML textarea; it allows for the rich formatting of text content, including common structural treatments like lists, formatting treatments like bold and italic text, and drag-and-drop inclusion and sizing of images. The Rich Text Editor's toolbar is extensible via a plugin architecture so that advanced implementations can achieve a high degree of customization.
In order to give you the greatest possible control over the size and performance of the Rich Text Editor codebase, we provide two versions of the Editor module and two versions of the buttons that live on the Toolbar:
Editor: Editor contains all features described on this page;
SimpleEditor: SimpleEditor contains a subset of Editor's features. (See "Choosing Between Editor and SimpleEditor" for more details.)
ToolbarButtonAdvanced: The advanced Toolbar buttons are based on YUI Buttons; they are more richly featured at the cost of more dependencies.
ToolbarButton: The more simple Toolbar buttons have fewer dependencies and so are lighter on the page; they do not support progressive enhancement nor menu-button functionality. (See "Changing the Toolbar" for more about your Toolbar choices.)
Choose the right combination of features in your Editor and Toolbar to get the right tradeoff between size and richness for your application.