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by hitekker 3312 days ago
I think this looks great for CMS websites: where a user wishes to build an entire page in a web GUI.

For composing text in blocks on existing pages, like comments or posts, you would need a lighter-weight solution.

SlateJS (https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate) fits that purpose for me exceedingly well, more than DraftJS, Quill and others, since it doesn't treat XML/HTML as a second-class citizen.

The levels of complexity with text representation are:

Document -> Post -> Text

which corresponds roughly to the data sources:

JSON/Data Structure -> XML/HTML -> Plaintext / Markdown

Markdown can "upscale" to documents, but JSON data structures, by virtue of their complexity, do not "downscale" well at all to Markdown.

HTML is the simple middle for me: it shouldn't be used for documents, but it is totally intuitive for posts where a users simply wants to adjust the color of one's text. The blocks wrapping this text should own the data structure, e.g. a flag for "NSFW Content" shouldn't be in the text editor but an option on the post itself.

2 comments

This is actually using slate js! We've been contributing to slate too :)
Ha, then I should read more carefully before I comment :-)

Excellent work! Do you think it may make more sense to market Ory as a Page Editor or Page Maker? Content in my mind can mean anything from a block to an entire page, though I recognize that CMS's have popularized the idea of content being equivalent to a page.

Right now, I see "Layout Editor" and "Content Editor" being used to describe it, so maybe it would make sense to standardize that.

Just a thought!

Yes, we've been banging our heads to finde the right terminology to describe it. We'll put page editor / maker to our list of keywords :)
Agreed. I like the simplicity of http://megadraft.io/ (built on draft.js).