Re: [w3c/editing] Universal interface to modify content in a JS editor from unrelated JS code. (Issue #551)

GaurangTandon left a comment (w3c/editing#551)

Hi @johanneswilm appreciate your taking the time to test various editors and heuristics. Your posts have shown how difficult it is to build a browser extension that (legitimately) emulates text input on the user's behalf, for use cases such as grammar correction (the one you're building) or text expansion (the one I have).

Regarding your "Working solutions", I do not believe we should rely on any existing behavior of the editors and attempt to build heuristics around those, because:

1. Detecting the _exact_ editor is close to impossible. An editor itself can have different behaviors (1) across different versions, (2) across different configurations/settings/plugins on the same version, (3) across internal/corporate forked packages on the same settings and versions. An extension therefore cannot reliably build a "library of supported editors".
2. Even then, whenever an editor deploys a new version that changes its behavior, or whenever a user uses our extension on an editor we do not track, our extension would immediately break.

This would be a never-ending game for extension developers while providing a bad experience for users.

I believe our common goal is to be able to build browser extensions that provide a great text editing experience for users while allowing them the flexibility to use whichever editor like. For this, I believe the only way is to provide a dedicated API built-in to the browser.

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