Nick Santos (medium) on "Why contentEditable is terrible"
Piotrek Koszuliński (CKEditor) on "contentEditable — the good, the bad, and the ugly"
Piotrek Koszuliński (CKEditor) on "Fixing contentEditable"
List of contentEditable browser inconsistencies by Guardian
- Facebook implements rich editing via textarea and an overlayed element on top to visualize mentions
- Google plus has
contenteditable="plaintext-only"which seems to be completely JS-driven plain element - Grammarly implements grammar-correcting-underlines via textarea + element on top (reasons: contenteditable is slow to render, no way to clean markup, hard to do proper selection/annotations)
- Quip has a hybrid editor (each paragraph is a contenteditable line; same with http://notion.so)
- Trix editor ignores contentEditable and maintains its own internal model (to avoid dealing with x-browser inconsistencies and complexities); same with ProseMirror
Chrome ticket on improving painting performance of contentEdtiable
Original discussion from June 2014
To make this simpler for sites, frameworks, and browsers, it makes sense to enable a new, simpler version of contentEditable that provides basic functionality only. For the sake of discussion, call it contentEditable='minimal'
Julie Parent breaking down potential contentEditable=minimal functionality:
- Selections: Enable selections, perform cursor movement, scoping the boundaries on which the selection can operate.
- Input: Perform dom modifications, dispatch events, not limited to keyboard input, also includes IME, paste, drop, etc.
- Spell check: Enable spell check, modify the dom (or dispatch an event) when the user selects a replacement
- Formatting magic: bold when the user hits control + b, change directionality on Ctrl+LeftShift , etc.
Where do we draw the line with cE=minimal? Only 1 or 1+2? Should cE=minimal modify DOM? Opinions divided in two. Some say that DOM mutation is a can of worms that shouldn't be opened (instead allowing user to change it programmatically). Others say that cE=minimal will be useless without some sort of automatic text modification.
W3C ticket on contentEditable=plaintext
Piotr Koszuliński on current progress with contentEditable=minimal
| contentEditable value | Fires events | Draws cursor | Mutates DOM | Formatting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| minimal | yes | no | no | no |
| minimal-with-cursor | yes | yes | no | no |
| minimal-with-mutation | yes | yes | yes | no |
| true | yes | yes | yes | yes |