[brodo]

This is all true plus other things that make it difficult to implement a rich text editor are accessibility (keyboard shortcuts!), dark mode (theming) and customizability.

Having a rich text editor in the web standards would be nice for prototyping. However all the form elements (select, date picker, progress bar etc.) are also web standards but no one uses them because they are ugly and not customizable.

So the chances that we will get a standard rich text editor on the web that web devs would actually use are slim.

[josephg]

Yeah good catch - OS-native keyboard shortcuts are really important & hard to reimplement well!

Nobody uses the built in date picker because it’s ugly, and making your own date picker is relatively easy. (Well, at least on desktop). Rich text editing is the inverse - it’s basically impossible to make your own. But theming a built in rich text editor should be really easy.

All the browser should implement is a rich text area itself. Leave it up to the web developers to add our own buttons for bold / italics / etc - since people will want to style that stuff themselves anyway. And add a clean, simple event API for “onchange” or something which gets called before any change is applied to the text area - initiated by a user or by the system. The event should tells you exactly what the change is (including styling) and let you tweak the change before it gets applied to the input element.

I think web devs would go bananas for something like that if it was designed well. I’d use it for sure.