why is there different files for IE and Gecko

News Flash: They're still incompatible.

And unfortunatly, we need to support some of the older browsers, but I'm sure this will fade as the new ones come out.

A good example, IE5.5. It just plain sucks.

And as far as I can tell, it's set up so it's 'browser independent', as far as it goes, _because_ of the ie/gecko files. Same functions, just executed in the 'special' way it needs to be for various browsers. I'm betting safari will be similar. But I'm a little glassy-eyed, so I dunno if I'm making sense.

Dig through the code a little maybe, see what's really going on. Always a good idea!

It is easy to deal with browser quirks when outputing marked up HTML and CSS. Yes there are some differences, however well structured markup and CSS can cope with it.

However, FCKeditor has to deal with much more than the differences in rendering quirks. IE and Gecko implement completely different editable areas which are not part of the DOM standard at all as far as I know. If you look at the code you'll see the methods used for implementing editor tasks are often vastly different.

Perhaps these could have been catered for with loads of IF statements, but the method Fred has chosen results in far more optimised code for the target environment.

I'm guessing the same will happen when Safari support is added, unless they've opted for compatibility with the Gecko method.