htmlArea was the original name for a widget that replaced textarea
elements with a full WYSIWYG editor.
The project has since vanished into oblivion, but given that Safari’s HTML editing was fundamentally broken until version 3, I started keeping a mini-directory of similar efforts here, mostly based on contentEditable
.
I started doing that back in February 2009. It’s now 2016, and we still haven’t fixed this.
In short, it’s amazing how much effort people are wasting putting together (often brilliant) solutions for something that should have been sorted out early on in the history of the web browser.
Resources:
Date | Link | Category | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
2016 | |||
Sep | Trix | JavaScript | Basecamp’s own editor, with its own internal representation/document model. |
Slate | JavaScript | A more generic approach for building custom editors. | |
2015 | |||
Aug | Prosemirror | JavaScript | A collaborative editor that uses Markdown as internal representation |
2014 | |||
May | Quill | JavaScript | Another one with a sane approach at editing URLs (reached 1.0 in 2016, featuring an interesting internal document model and delta transforms for simultaneous editing). |
Mar | scribe | JavaScript | yet another attempt at taming contentEditable that almost works on mobile, except for a tendency to insert non-breaking spaces. |
Feb | jquery-notebook | JavaScript | A simple but effective jQuery plugin |
2013 | |||
Oct | Sir Trevor | JavaScript | A very nice block-oriented editor. Depends on jQuery and a few other libraries. |
Sep | medium-editor | JavaScript | Inspired by the Medium editor, no dependencies, has a companion image upload plugin. |
2012 | |||
May | Redactor | JavaScript | Pretty amazing. Requires jQuery. |
Jan | wysihtml5 | JavaScript | An HTML5-oriented effort, in use by XING. |
Aloha Editor | JavaScript | Unobtrusive and lightweight. | |
2009 | |||
Feb 13 | WYMeditor | JavaScript | a very nice What You See Is What You Mean editor. |
Older | Flash Text Area | Flash | works pretty well, even considering the formatting options are very limited |
flashArea | free, $5 for source code. Does images, but has a bazillion standalone .swf files for each button. |
||
Obedit | pretty good for text-only input, doesn’t do images. | ||
Flash text editor | pretty old. | ||
Wikiwyg | JavaScript | Mozilla-only, very old. |