Aloha Editor - HTML5 WYSIWYG Editor

Looks very promising.

One thing I wonder, though, is why WYSIWYG editors still use explicit markup (bold, italic, font size) instead of allowing the definition of styles. This is a hassle if you want to write consistent documents.

Even Google Documents does this; it does not have custom named styles like Word. It only has named styles for header 1..6, but usually that's not enough.

Having written an editor on contentEditable before, I think the biggest challenge is paste events.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3553041/how-can-you-catch...

The onpaste event isn't supported across the board, and doesn't let you access the paste content in any way.

Just try copying a webpage and posting it into the Aloha Editor area- it will paste the entire dom. Blech. contentEditable should be a boon for web devs, but instead the idea of a writable web has stagnated on a buggy, inconsistent implementation of contentEditable.

I'm looking forward to the next iteration of editable html content!

Just drag'n'drop an image from your desktop into the page. At least it worked for me ;)

I built an in page editor like this a few years ago. I took a completely different approach however. I used jQuery to parse the entire page as XML and the used some dom navigation to work out path locations to the node I was on. There are jQuery libraries which will select nodes via xpath queries.

Then with some string functions I managed to break each node down into text runs (just wrapping spans around text blocks) so that I could apply styles to certain segments. Preserved the whole document in valid XHTML.

Just food for thought if you feel like making the editing functions even more granular.

I had some interesting problems with this in chrome. And by interesting I mean it became functionally useless very quickly.

It is a great idea and I see where they're going but it ain't there yet.