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Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

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Re: Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

#21

Post by _the_inflator »

Someone has to do it:

Please auto-ban any "We gave Claude/Gemini/Grok/OpenAO/Qwen/Mistral/WhateverLLMAI the spec and..."

"and..." resolves to:

- "and now we have this impressive result you won't believe!"

100% of the time this is attention seeking, live debugging - no value at all.

Don't waste people's time. Any sound and reasonable story about results without misusing the public's eye is welcome, for example:

- One year after - 10 hard problems we found - extensive pro/contra comparison with other solutions - maintaining such a AI app for one year

Otherwise: please auto-ban.

Re: Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

#23

Post by efilife »

_the_inflator wrote: post #21

Someone has to do it: Please auto-ban any "We gave Claude/Gemini/Grok/OpenAO/Qwen/Mistral/WhateverLLMAI the spec and..." "and..." resolves to: - "and now we have this impressive result you won't believe!" 100% of the time this is attention seeking, live debugging - no value at all. Don't waste people's time. Any sound and reasonable story about results without misusing the public's eye is welcome, for example: - One…

Seconded. I could ask the LLM myself and see what it comes up with in 5 minutes, not to mention that all of this was done 1000 times already so I have no interest of doing so.

Also, it's effortless. Not interesting at all if you can't share any insight about the project, because you don't know how it works under the hood and how many architectural problems were solved (or not)

Re: Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

#24

Post by pryelluw »

jimjimjim wrote: post #15
mediumdeviation wrote: post #2

Ah these poor fools. Having built this exact product (OOXML compatible editor in React) before, it took all of two minutes to find a bug. The issue is that the OOXML spec is not in fact definitive - Word is, and trying to implement it from the spec will produce something that works maybe 80% of the time then fall over completely when you hit one of hundreds of minor, undocumented edge cases. Assuming of course that C…

I feel your pain. PDF applications have the same problem. The thousand page PDF spec isn't actually the spec, Acrobat is the spec.

I feel the pain having had to build a browser based pdf editor with features not found anywhere else. React was hammered into working and turned out pretty good. But my god, it was quite a journey. As with all enterprise projects, this one was shelved because business changed their minds. Two years of figuring it out just wasted …

Re: Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

#25

Post by bonesss »

> As an experiment

The threshold for caring about experiments is exponentially higher in 2026 thanks to half baked vibe slop.

Non-functioning software and demoware comes fast and cheap, regardless of author.

> we gave Claude Code the OOXML spec

Having used the former a lot and read the latter in detail, uhhh…

Trim down the claims here, clarify the editor subset you plan to be supporting, and map the “last 90%”’s to honestly reflect the product you are pushing.

If “tables” and “images” aren’t there I’m quite skeptical about content controls and other key OOXML constructs being addressed meaningfully. The full OOXML footprint chokes OpenOffice out of procurements, rich OOXML documents choke half-way-there implementations (which was the whole point of the format).

As is pointed out elsewhere in the thread - there are fundamental constraints that have kept Google, Apple, and others from pursuing this route. Relatively simple docs are one thing, but OOXML is full of dragons and parity with Word has eluded more than a few tech giants.

Re: Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

#27

Post by throawayonthe »

jimjimjim wrote: post #15
mediumdeviation wrote: post #2

Ah these poor fools. Having built this exact product (OOXML compatible editor in React) before, it took all of two minutes to find a bug. The issue is that the OOXML spec is not in fact definitive - Word is, and trying to implement it from the spec will produce something that works maybe 80% of the time then fall over completely when you hit one of hundreds of minor, undocumented edge cases. Assuming of course that C…

I feel your pain. PDF applications have the same problem. The thousand page PDF spec isn't actually the spec, Acrobat is the spec.

do people still use acrobat? since pds becoming prolific in browsers and word and stuff i mean

Re: Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

#28

Post by aitchnyu »

chenmx wrote: post #22

[dead]

I would have liked to see the feedback loop and harness instead of the end product. 12 years back, I was opening the 12000 page ECMA OOXML format and also reverse engineering Word's output (half my time spent from undocumented crap) and having "unit tests" to generate Docs which I had to check by eye.

Re: Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

#29

Post by FranklinJabar »

jimjimjim wrote: post #15
mediumdeviation wrote: post #2

Ah these poor fools. Having built this exact product (OOXML compatible editor in React) before, it took all of two minutes to find a bug. The issue is that the OOXML spec is not in fact definitive - Word is, and trying to implement it from the spec will produce something that works maybe 80% of the time then fall over completely when you hit one of hundreds of minor, undocumented edge cases. Assuming of course that C…

I feel your pain. PDF applications have the same problem. The thousand page PDF spec isn't actually the spec, Acrobat is the spec.

Acrobat at least hasn't been relevant for over a decade outside of niche concerns (like javascript-enabled pdfs, which I have seen exactly twice in the wild... these should be illegal by the way). You can't say the same about microsoft.

Re: Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor

#30

Post by lelanthran »

_the_inflator wrote: post #21

Someone has to do it: Please auto-ban any "We gave Claude/Gemini/Grok/OpenAO/Qwen/Mistral/WhateverLLMAI the spec and..." "and..." resolves to: - "and now we have this impressive result you won't believe!" 100% of the time this is attention seeking, live debugging - no value at all. Don't waste people's time. Any sound and reasonable story about results without misusing the public's eye is welcome, for example: - One…

The real tragedy is that I can only give a single upvote. This post needs to be added to the HN guidelines, I feel.

We are being overwhelmed with slop. Not even original slop, but carefully specced slop that poorly replicates some existing functionality, but as a SaaS.

This is the 90s equivalent of "Doing $FOO, but on the internet", only it's "Copying $FOO, but with added costs as a SaaS".

That it is AI is just another black mark against it.

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