[b33j0r]

I might have a way to simplify this?

A plaintext document is an array of chars, a richtext document is tree, which may or may not be well-formed.

Think about someone trying to bold semi-half of_a sentence_, and how MS Frontpage was made by smart people, it’s just really hard.

The most interesting thing lately is the HTML attribute `contenteditable`, and how it almost just kinda works! You still have to be full-stack to make something good, but that was an amazing improvement to the browser.

[badsectoracula]

Yeah, that trying to bold half of a sentence - or even better, the middle of a sentence - is why i was wondering about simpler alternatives to DOM. Some time ago i toyed around with an HTML editor[0] (that one had to use a DOM anyway, but my question is for rich text editing in general - BTW the rectangles in the shot show a selection that goes across nodes) and doing something like that involved traversing all the nodes (going both down and up the node tree, starting from the cursor's starting position), finding the closest common ancestors under the selection, creating "B" siblings to them and then reparenting them under these new "B" nodes.

You can move a lot of that stuff to reusable methods but personally i find the whole "editing" aspect to be more involved than the "drawing" side - and also the one more likely to be different than a plain text editor - when dealing with DOM-like structures. Hence why i am interested to see what alternatives there are.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/jLlyNSS.png

[b33j0r]

Nice. I’ve searched far and wide, and most people still end up starting a whole company that only does a text editor.

Quill works but is basically dead since 2017. Almost anything foss is in a similarly ambiguous boat.

And then people like us, defeated, eventually buy something when we actually need it.

There are just so many ways that users try to use it. It’s a tough problem!