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I would strongly urge you to consider starting out with ACE instead of relearning the lessons learned by those who came before you. ACE is a well-tested, relatively-performant, extendable-by-design basis for any web-based text editing project. I followed the mailing lists for a long time, and it was not a trivial decision for Mozilla to abandon their efforts with Bespin in favor of ACE, but it was a necessary one.