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by mapt8 hours ago |
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upvoteby CGamesPlay8 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby atombender5 hours ago|
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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.

Early editors like FCKEditor and TinyMCE were only wrappers around contenteditable. They used the DOM as the real document model, then intercepted certain keypresses and events and "fixed" the behavior when it wasn't correct (e.g. double enter inside a bullet list should switch to paragraph mode).

The result was rife with bugs and inconsistencies, and didn't allow for a proper split between the model and the view (e.g. to represent columns, video embeds, and so on).

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upvoteby rubyfan4 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby atombender1 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby nicoburns1 hours ago|
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FCKEditor and TinyMCE were using contenteditable.
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upvoteby nicoburns1 hours ago|
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> 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).

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upvoteby Tade03 hours ago|
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For the longest time browser vendors couldn't even agree on the details of how just text selection should work.
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