Yet Another Text Web Editor and What's Wrong with contenteditable?
summary
A developer describes why their team built a custom rich-text web editor instead of using existing libraries, focusing on the limitations and quirks of the browser ContentEditable API. The talk explains the product requirements that boxed solutions couldn’t meet, the specific problems encountered with ContentEditable, and the approaches the team used to solve them — including why they initially considered abandoning ContentEditable and later returned to it.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:33Talk overview
- 1:17Product goals
- 4:29Existing flaws
- 6:39Three editor types
- 7:21Why contenteditable fails
- 8:25Twin-block solution
- 10:30System demo
- 11:35Data format
- 12:58Text changes
- 14:21Word processor mechanics
- 16:07Handling text changes
- 17:08Text diffs and ops
- 18:57System integration
- 19:59Custom solution worth it
- 21:02Key takeaways
- 22:46Discussion
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