This is something I faced at the BBC. Our mantra was to always separate content from presentation but found that providing a quasi-preview was something that journalists felt more comfortable with – it allowed them to create a page much more quickly. They also liked to see if they were emboldening some text, or if an inline link was present, the visual clues were important and the difficulty with sanity/cleaning manual tag input (a la wiki code) wasn’t going to fly. We implemented our CMS editor using TinyMCE and writing custom plugins that threw-up a light-box editing interface that allowed the journalists to enter data into the various fields and drag and drop images, etc. which then inserted a tiny, specialised HTML tag into the editing screen which would then be decorated with CSS and Javascript to provide an indication as to what the “module” was – be it an embedded quote or FAQ box or image with caption…