I actually started a simple WYSIWYG editor that doesn't use contentEditable but instead a tiny subset of HTML and some virtual DOM like technology. Thanks for this post. It makes me want to work more on it!
Pell – A simple and small rich-text editor for the web
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Re: Pell – A simple and small rich-text editor for the web
#12[deleted]
Re: Pell – A simple and small rich-text editor for the web
#13Also the editor that will output the most inconsistent HTML across browsers. There's a reason all those other editors try and fix contenteditable (and are therefore > 1k), for more info see https://medium.engineering/why-contenteditable-is-terrible-1...
Re: Pell – A simple and small rich-text editor for the web
#14Fantastic, I was in fact wondering why other editors were so big. I love it!
Re: Pell – A simple and small rich-text editor for the web
#15As a person who used to work for a company developing one of the more popular in-browser text editors I can tell you that all that "bloat" is there so that you'll get consistent results across browsers.
Unfortunately there's no way around this short of not using contenteditable - which is even worse sometimes.
Most editors feature customized builds which let you reduce the footprint of the editor. If you're looking for quick gains first and foremost disable support for pasting from other applications, e.g. MS Word. It's always a major feature.
Re: Pell – A simple and small rich-text editor for the web
#16This is cool :) That said (and not to take thunder away from your page), this is possible because the HTML spec itself allows for any element to be made into a "WYSIWYG" editor by adding the "contenteditable" attribute. What most other larger editors are doing is working around some of the horrendous non-standardized versions of execCommand which varies across browsers. Ideally a web standards body should come out wi…
This library is using execCommand: https://github.com/jaredreich/pell/blob/master/src/pell.js
I note that `contenteditable` itself began as a proprietary DOM/HTML extension by Microsoft in IE5.5 back in 2000 - Gecko didn't support it until 2003. In the 2008 draft of the HTML5 specification[1] the `contenteditable` attribute's summary seems to imply that it's only featured because it "is a common attribute".
[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-20080610/editing.html#co...
Re: Pell – A simple and small rich-text editor for the web
#17Appears to fail my semantics test right off the bat. Type "Line one\nLine two" results in: Line one Line two
Since it uses contenteditable, the result depends on your browser. Firefox gives me Line one Line two
Yeah, I'm not convinced contenteditable is ready for primetime. In my experience, pairing it with some javascript that cleans up the poor markup is necessary.
Re: Pell – A simple and small rich-text editor for the web
#18This is cool :) That said (and not to take thunder away from your page), this is possible because the HTML spec itself allows for any element to be made into a "WYSIWYG" editor by adding the "contenteditable" attribute. What most other larger editors are doing is working around some of the horrendous non-standardized versions of execCommand which varies across browsers. Ideally a web standards body should come out wi…
This library is using execCommand: https://github.com/jaredreich/pell/blob/master/src/pell.js I note that `contenteditable` itself began as a proprietary DOM/HTML extension by Microsoft in IE5.5 back in 2000 - Gecko didn't support it until 2003. In the 2008 draft of the HTML5 specification[1] the `contenteditable` attribute's summary seems to imply that it's only featured because it "is a common attribute". [1]: http…
My point was execCommand is non-standard, thus requiring workarounds for different browsers/platforms.
Re: Pell – A simple and small rich-text editor for the web
#19Copy & Pasting needs some work. Usually the biggest hurdle is people pasting content from other pages and the editor can't sanitize it properly. This doesn't appear to do any cleaning, which in practice never works because regular people do not know how to use the plain pasting mechanism (Ctrl+Shift+V instead of Ctrl+V).
Re: Pell – A simple and small rich-text editor for the web
#20As a person who used to work for a company developing one of the more popular in-browser text editors I can tell you that all that "bloat" is there so that you'll get consistent results across browsers. Unfortunately there's no way around this short of not using contenteditable - which is even worse sometimes. Most editors feature customized builds which let you reduce the footprint of the editor. If you're looking f…
sometimes, you can be sure of the browser / rendering engine ahead of time, and you don't need all that "bloat".
For instance, react-native, electron or windows store apps.