Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

open.nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 176 posts

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#111

Post by z3t4 »

manigandham wrote: post #5

Cool, but it's yet another case of re-engineering the same thing. (edit: its not entirely new). Splitting editors into an abstracted structure for finer control over data and presentation is something that's been done for a decade now in various text editors. Medium and Basecamp started similar projects and there's Mobiledoc which is trying to standardize the format. It'd be nice if all this effort focused on a singl…

Going with your own format has some advantages, but using a well known popular format also has advantages. I did look into ProseMirrors and other editors but due to the formatting I ended up making my own. Where I've gone the painful route of having HTML nodes instead of a JSON tree. My reasoning is that I always want to end up with HTML anyway, and this also allows switching back and forth between editing HTML and WYSIWYG-mode. And use existing source control (Git/Mercurial) for versioning. The biggest pain is that browsers like to mess with the white space, and different browsers want to format the HTML in their own way. The next step would be to implement my own html/CSS renderer/wysiwyg-editor using the canvas. When researching I found some proprietary tools that did that. I wish the contentEditable would get more love from the browser vendors, because that's what most web editors use.

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#112

Post by bm1362 »

salatschussel wrote: post #99
manigandham wrote: post #5

Cool, but it's yet another case of re-engineering the same thing. (edit: its not entirely new). Splitting editors into an abstracted structure for finer control over data and presentation is something that's been done for a decade now in various text editors. Medium and Basecamp started similar projects and there's Mobiledoc which is trying to standardize the format. It'd be nice if all this effort focused on a singl…

> Splitting editors into an abstracted structure for finer control over data and presentation is something that's been done for a decade now in various text editors. Sounds like Latex which has been around much longer.

Is there a web-based WYSIWYG editor?

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#113

Post by scottmf »

gh02t wrote: post #100
zem wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the BBC sounds like it has a really good tech team too. wonder what it is about newspapers that leads to this sort of tech culture.

A desire to stay relevant. Print publishers often get criticized for being behind the curve, but a few like NYT and BBC have invested heavily in the technology of their business. Not sure how much it's paid off, but my impression is they aren't struggling as much as some. I hope they manage to find the right combination to stay around, I loathe the dystopian future where Buzzfeed and Breitbart are the only news outle…

Buzzfeed isn’t comparable to Breitbart at all. Buzzfeed does real journalism these days.

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#114

Post by [deleted] »

dingo_bat wrote: post #73
venning wrote: post #4

Data Warning: 100 MB. Viewing the header illustration for more than a few seconds crashes my iPad Safari tab. Scrolling until it is off the viewport prevents this. EDIT: Dev Tools reports 74.8 MB transferred with an ad blocker. The illustration is a single 69.2 MB gif. EDIT: 101 MB in total when you scroll to the bottom. Three more gifs: 18.1 MB, 7.1 MB, 4.7 MB.

There's something wrong with your iPad or safari itself. My 2 year old phone has no problems keeping up. It is incredibly stupid to have a 69 MB gif though.

[deleted]

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#115

Post by onion2k »

WizardOfNomaha wrote: post #107
onion2k wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A word of unsolicited advice: Someone who thinks "I am a Python developer" is generally less useful to a team than someone who thinks "I am a developer who is good at Python."

In most hiring settings this isn't true though. Language-specific skills actually do matter, for all but entry-level positions at massive tech companies. It's not like my 3 years of experience in Ruby is immediately translatable to Java/Python/whatever. Could I get up to speed in those languages in due time? Sure. But if you were on a hiring committee, hiring for a team that works mostly with Java (or whatever) would…

Language-specific skills actually do matter, for all but entry-level positions at massive tech companies.

Absolutely, which is why I didn't stop at "I am a developer". That "who is good at Python" bit is definitely important.

However, seeing yourself as a "Python developer" rather than "a developer who is good at Python" makes it look like you see every problem as something you'll solve using Python. That's bad. That will put a lot of companies off hiring you (companies that believe in a 'best tool for the job' approach anyway, and those are the ones you probably want to work for).

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#116

Post by maccard »

onion2k wrote: post #104
ramphastidae wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any openings that need Python folks?

A word of unsolicited advice: Someone who thinks "I am a Python developer" is generally less useful to a team than someone who thinks "I am a developer who is good at Python."

Not all languages are created equal. While yes a developer with years of experience in python may have lots of transferable skills to other languages, my team arent going to hire someone for a mid level/senior position without a good knowledge of c++

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#118

Post by outworlder »

WizardOfNomaha wrote: post #107
onion2k wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A word of unsolicited advice: Someone who thinks "I am a Python developer" is generally less useful to a team than someone who thinks "I am a developer who is good at Python."

In most hiring settings this isn't true though. Language-specific skills actually do matter, for all but entry-level positions at massive tech companies. It's not like my 3 years of experience in Ruby is immediately translatable to Java/Python/whatever. Could I get up to speed in those languages in due time? Sure. But if you were on a hiring committee, hiring for a team that works mostly with Java (or whatever) would…

> It's not like my 3 years of experience in Ruby is immediately translatable to Java/Python/whatever.

It should be.

Picking up language X is very easy for most values of X (more esoteric ones excluded). After you know a few (and the more diverse the set, the less new concepts you'll see), picking up a new one is quick. If it is something like Go, it's a weekend's worth.

Using the language in idiomatic ways and knowing the most useful libraries and frameworks does take more significant ramp-up time. If you are a solo developer, or if the entire team is ramping up at the same time, then it is bad.

But a new, experienced team member, with zero knowledge in the most used language in the team? Sure, why not? They may even bring new skills to an otherwise homogeneous group.

I always let the interviewee pick the language during my interviews. Usually it is something like Javascript or Python. Sometimes it is Bash. I keep waiting for the day someone will offer to do it in Scheme, Haskell, Elixir, Prolog, D, Rust, even Ada. Pseudocode is actually fine too, unless I have a reason to think the individual lacks programming experience.

Whatever you do, DO NOT brand yourself as a X developer, if X is a programming language. I can understand specializations like machine learning. But languages? It's a mere tool, and you need more than one in your toolbox.

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#119

Post by zaarn »

nwmcsween wrote: post #105
TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

RE the flat paragraph structure - did they just reimplement Emacs in the browser? https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Te... (Also I think - from occasional messing with XML in .docx files - but can't be sure that Word flattens styling like that as well.)

Any sufficiently complicated editor contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of emacs? I prefer vim though..

Any editor is simply a graphical frontend to ed, even vim.

Re: Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

#120

Post by unhammer »

zawerf wrote: post #93
philcockfield wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like Slate....but the ability to do collaborative editing is relatively new. Have you done anything with collaborative editing with Slate? If so, how are you finding it?

Collaboration isn't a requirement for me. I would definitely go with quill instead if it were. They put a lot of thought into making the delta format natural for operational transforms: https://quilljs.com/docs/delta/ Your document state is always represented by a list of deltas. Two people trying to change the same document would just have their individual list of ops "rebased" together using OT before being concate…

Quill has a great API, it seems like they really thought things through and designed it (what's a good word for the opposite of ad-hoc?). Even the lower-level bits are available with a clean API if you should ever need them (e.g. it's super simple to use the underlying OT and diff/merge functions on whatever text you want)
Post reply on HN