Re: [w3c/editing] Removal of browser built-in Undo stack functionality from contenteditable (#150)

> You keep calling it "broken", but maybe this is because you have this perspective of a JS editor developer (which I sympathize with, but it's not the only perspective).

I wish I were. I tried, like you to build my own editor on top of contenteditable several years ago. That was the first few years of Fidus Writer. I spent every awake moment fixing bugs until I finally gave up trying to create both an editing framework and a working editor (with export to various formats, document management, etc.) at the same time and switched to an editing framework for the document manipulation part.

But I try as much as possible not just to represent the interests of that particular framework, and I communicate with other frameworks and individual, production level editors before and after W3C meetings to make sure their voice gets heard.

> For most users, ensuring the ability to copy & paste between different rich textboxes will be more important than the "purity" of the HTML. Therefore, a **harmonized set of markup across browsers** (e.g. `<b>` for bold) may be more important than the freedom of editor developers to micromanage the DOM. 

I disagree. About 10-15 years ago that's what everyone did. The result then was that people would write blog posts in various word processors and pasted it into the JavaScript text editor of their platform (for example Joomla). The result would be a horrible mishmash of differently styles and noone really wants that, which is why CKEditor, TinyMCE & co improved over time.

Look, noone can stop you from creating a broken web experience. We are doing all we can to warn you against doing that, and to learn from the experiences of the web, but in the end you an still create an editor that behaves as broken as what was common in 2005 and noone will stop you from doing so. In another project someone even argued for using old browsers on old computers and to only program for that usecase because that person thought there are no advantages to using newer machines, and it is entirely legal to think and do that. For now the browser makers' view is that execCommand and contenteditable is used in so many old web sites that it will not be removable for decades to come. So you should be fine.

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Received on Monday, 2 December 2019 20:55:58 UTC