Click here to watch The Battle for the Body Field: Drupal and the future of WYSIWYG

There's a deep conflict in the heart of Drupal 8, and its name is WYSIWYG.

For years, our community has used powerful tools like CCK and FieldAPI to manage structured content and implement powerful, flexible content models. By chunking up our content and using templates to present it, we've avoided the worst sins of "HTML blobs."

Unfortunately, Team Chunk has a deadly weakness. When narrative text is mixed with embedded media, complex call-outs, and other rich supporting material, our fields and templates have trouble keeping up. On many projects, the ever-present Body field becomes a WYSIWYG-powered no-man's-land, and all of our future-friendly content dreams are shattered.

With the addition of a powerful WYSIWYG editor to Drupal 8, the problem is even more pressing. How can we ensure that the next generation of Drupal sites is easy to manage, and flexible enough for a multi-device world? In this session, I'll explain:

• The underlying content management challenges that make this problem so thorny
• What we can learn from the XML community (without going crazy)
• Existing Drupal tools and techniques that can bridge the gap
• Which approaches sound great but sabotage complex content
• Why Drupal 8's new WYSIWYG editor can help or hurt sites
• The tools Drupal Core could provide to help content editors work smart
• What barriers for those solutions still exist in core
• How emerging web standards can simplify the implementation work