There's a beautiful interactive demo on the Aloha Editor site so you can try it for yourself. Just plug in Aloha Editor and go.Īnother key feature of Aloha Editor is a focus on sophisticated handling of copy and paste from Microsoft Word, which can be a huge boost in productivity. The advantage of not using contentEditable is that you don't have to worry about the details of browser support and implementation. In fact, Aloha Editor does not use it at all! Instead, it provides a simple, lightweight (142KB), JavaScript library giving you a fast editor that you can integrate into your Web projects. Check out the ProseMirror Collaborative Demo for a hands-on look at how it works, then read Haverbeke's " ProseMirror" overview essay and " Collaborative Editing in ProseMirror" deep dive into the mechanics of coordinating changes between multiple users.Īfter all that talk about contentEditable, it's important to point out that not all rich text editors use that approach today. The library has built-in hooks for storing local changes, sending document changes over the wire (using your transport of choice), handling conflicts, supporting multiple levels of undo and more. In addition, ProseMirror is being designed from the ground up as a collaborative online editor. Instead, Haverbeke is creating an extensible, semantic document model based on the CommonMark implementation of Markdown. What's different about ProseMirror? While it uses contentEditable, the underlying document model is not HTML. Like most of the editors I'll discuss here, ProseMirror is a library for creating in-browser, HTML-based text editors. First, ProseMirror ( Figure 2) is the latest open source effort by Marijn Haverbeke, whose previous projects include the interactive online tutorial and print book, " Eloquent JavaScript" and the browser-based code editor, CodeMirror (which I discussed previously in the May 2014 column, " 25+ Tools for Cross-Platform Code Editing and Collaboration"). With those historical notes out of the way, let's take a look at a few of the rich text editors available to you today.Īn interesting new project to create a conentEditable-based, collaborative rich text editor is ProseMirror, and I think it's a project worth keeping an eye on. (If you're interested in more Internet Explorer history like this, I highly recommend listening to the " Leader of the Internet Explorer Project, Ben Slivka" episode of Brian McCullough's excellent Internet History Podcast.) There's brief-but-straightforward documentation for Content Editable over at Mozilla Developer Network, and an interactive ContentEditable demo at HTML5 Demos. These features were popular enough, in fact, that they were rather quickly reverse-engineered and added to competing browsers.įor some interesting background on this history, see Mark Pilgrim's " The Road to HTML5: contentEditable" post at The WHATWG Blog. Microsoft included this functionality in Internet Explorer with the intention that developers could use it to develop rich text editors, and they did. Editing Text in a contentEditable Element Users could edit the text within an editable element or page, and the browser also provided API hooks for commands that enabled features like bold or italic styling, adding links, and so on (see Figure 1). DesignMode made the entire document editable, while contentEditable made a specific element (and its child elements) editable. The state of Web content editing changed significantly with the release of Internet Explorer 5.5, in 2000, which introduced the designMode and contentEditable attributes. Later we got the ability to submit plain text back to the server, which might build a new page with the new content. or at least a writer with some technical expertise in HTML markup. Think about it: At one time, content had to be built into a Web page by a programmer. Maybe I'm going out on a limb with this one, but it seems to me that rich text editors represented an important step forward in moving the World Wide Web from a broadcast-oriented, publisher/programmer-focused endeavor to an interactive, content-remixing medium where we can extend and build upon each other's expertise and inspiration.
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