I have just found a great tool for Domino based web applications needing HTML input for high fidelity formating (at least as close as you can with HTML) that doesn’t require the slow java rtf applet…
Its called htmlArea and is free from InteractiveTools. It took me about an hour to completely adapt the tool to my Domino environment, but I will be submitting an example database to the sandbox in the very near future in case you have a little harder time figuring it out.
Currently it only works with IE 5.0 and higher, but a new release is forthcoming that will support IE and Mozilla based browsers.
Basically, it transforms basic text field(s) into a holder for HTML that is manipulated by a very well written javascript/DHTML tool. In read mode hide the text field and wrap a computed text area with pass-through HTML tags and voila, you have quality HTML. It is extremely lite (download speed), easy to use, and provides full source code.
And it is free (GPL license).