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Wordgard: In-browser rich-text editor from the creator of ProseMirror

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Re: Wordgard: In-browser rich-text editor from the creator of ProseMirror

#71

Why this over Lexical by Meta?

Because Meta is not the default to everything.

I've personally been hoping for something like this for a while now. Especially a toolset that is not just targeting yet another SaaS or LLM or social media clone interface.

I don't know if you ever used Draft.js that FB put out some time ago, but it was a horribly buggy monstrosity that was a heavy lift to move away from. One could not write several paragraphs and edit them without losing a lot of work. I wouldn't touch "Lexical" no matter the marketing they put on top. I wouldn't be half as critical if it wasn't one of the wealthiest companies on the planet known for injecting billions into black holes while they raid every area of your life they possibly can for data to be used to manipulate socio-political matters everywhere. If they're going to do that, and release open source libraries, then at least make them good enough to be seductive. They aren't.

ProseMirror and seemingly WordGard have real thought and care put into them by people who have long made the DOM/developer experience and the writing experience priorities– not just their "mind share" for whatever dark purposes drive companies like Meta.

Re: Wordgard: In-browser rich-text editor from the creator of ProseMirror

#72
post #10

Getting that WYSIWYG editor up and running was a major stumbling block that I overcame to get my school newspaper a PHP-Nuke site ~25 years ago. It is insane that there isn't a web standard implementation for this passed 15 years ago.

For the longest time browser vendors couldn't even agree on the details of how just text selection should work.

Re: Wordgard: In-browser rich-text editor from the creator of ProseMirror

#74

I don't like WYSIWYG on the web. You do a long and tedious formatting of a forum post, then close the tab and it's all gone. I prefer to use a local text editor then Ctrl+V into web form. Which I can with markdown

I'm with you but many people do, simple is a side by side just like many html editors/markdown editors

Re: Wordgard: In-browser rich-text editor from the creator of ProseMirror

#75

Why this over Lexical by Meta?

Because Meta is not the default to everything. I've personally been hoping for something like this for a while now. Especially a toolset that is not just targeting yet another SaaS or LLM or social media clone interface. I don't know if you ever used Draft.js that FB put out some time ago, but it was a horribly buggy monstrosity that was a heavy lift to move away from. One could not write several paragraphs and edit…

Have you made that conclusion after thorough examination of the open-source code base?

Re: Wordgard: In-browser rich-text editor from the creator of ProseMirror

#76
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While these use contenteditable, it's not accurate to say they're just contenteditable plus some UI and interop. None of these modern editors (Wordgard, ProseMirror, Lexical, Slate) use contenteditable for the document model. Rather, they have their own internal document model and use contenteditable as a kind of input layer where the editor monitors what the browser does, then translates that into actual edits. Earl…

I’m not a historian but I think FCKEditor and TinyMCE predated contenteditable. These were solutions wrapping textarea back in the day if my memory serves me.

My memory is fuzzy here, so I may be wrong. But I remember the generation of buggy WYSIWYG editors that preceded ProseMirror, and they were all contenteditable-based. They would typically start by attaching to a textarea, but then replace it with a div.

Re: Wordgard: In-browser rich-text editor from the creator of ProseMirror

#77
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While these use contenteditable, it's not accurate to say they're just contenteditable plus some UI and interop. None of these modern editors (Wordgard, ProseMirror, Lexical, Slate) use contenteditable for the document model. Rather, they have their own internal document model and use contenteditable as a kind of input layer where the editor monitors what the browser does, then translates that into actual edits. Earl…

I’m not a historian but I think FCKEditor and TinyMCE predated contenteditable. These were solutions wrapping textarea back in the day if my memory serves me.

FCKEditor and TinyMCE were using contenteditable.

Re: Wordgard: In-browser rich-text editor from the creator of ProseMirror

#78
post #10

Getting that WYSIWYG editor up and running was a major stumbling block that I overcame to get my school newspaper a PHP-Nuke site ~25 years ago. It is insane that there isn't a web standard implementation for this passed 15 years ago.

There is contenteditable, which is what all these (Wordgard, ProseMirror) are fundamentally built on. The rest is just the UI, and interop with systems that don't desire arbitrary HTML as input.

> The rest is just the UI

"just contenteditable" is really understating things. contenteditable is a god awful API full of bugs and inconsistencies. Making something reliable on top of it is a very significant amount of work.

For context: my day job for last 2 years has been building a new browser engine from scratch, and I think the contenteditable-based WYSIWYG editor I wrote 15 years ago might have been a harder project (albeit I was lot of less experienced then).

Re: Wordgard: In-browser rich-text editor from the creator of ProseMirror

#79
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why wordgard is worth the switching cost? It may not be. If you're happy with ProseMirror, continue to use ProseMirror. I have your back. But as the blog posts describes, I had a whole pile of new design insights that avoid some of the issues I've ran into with ProseMirror, so I had the itch to build a new iteration. I'll add a link to the blog post to the docs section of the website. (It's marijn, not merijn.)

Thanks, that would indeed be helpful. > (It's marijn, not merijn.) oeps, sry!

I've taken the liberty of correcting the typo in your GP comment. I hope that's ok!
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