<div id="editor" contenteditable="true">The other 90% was all the backend code we had to write to properly synchronize edits across different browsers, each with their own bizarre suite of bugs in their contenteditable implementations :-)
I believe that a lot of problems can be converted into synchronization problems in browsers.
Are there any general synchronization libraries / applications that you suggest within browser / outside browser?
Thanks in advance.
This ends up feeling rather magical to the clients, because they don't need to go to an editing page to make changes before seeing what it will look like. They just literally edit the content in place on the page, and hit save to deploy it live.
Most of these sites are still in operation after 5-10 years and require almost zero maintenance on my end.
Under the hood it was about as shit as every other enterprise CMS of the era, but our users fucking loved it.
Turns out that it creates two representations of the PDF content - one is text, which has 0 opacity and another is prerendered image of the same layered on top of it. The latter is what's displayed. So while you can enable contenteditable and get the editing cursor, no changes you make will be shown. Oh, well.
ContentEditable first introduced in ie 5.5 in 2000, available in all major browsers in 2007.
I know that some people code in an HTML page rendered in Electron, that would be Atom and VS Code and family, but that's far enough from the majority of people that declaring "our code editor" is disingenuous.
My Code editor is NeoVim or it's IntelliJ
But there is no HTML page involved at all.
What I want to hint at: You're extrapolating the usage of VSCode.
What blows my mind is that people use frameworks where they include stuff that's not even JS in their HTML, stuff that needs external JS to attach to it or hydrate it. That feels like the worst of both worlds.
I definitely come from an opposite place where JS is king and I don't have any files with an ".html" extension exept for "index.html". And I don't have any HTML in my JS, either. Anything that's a partial template is ".htm" and gets hydrated before it gets added to the DOM.
How is this useful? For quick writing and sharing of HTML files, but not the links, but the files themselves.
Very interesting,thank you.
I actually also really like the idea of building simple/local web apps in a single HTML page. A while ago my child and I visited a science museum and played with a simple stop motion animator. I decided to make a web app just like it and built it as a single HTML page, copied it to her laptop and she can use it without internet. I built it using React and a bundler though, because I'm too lazy to write vanilla js. It just bundles into a single HTML file. Maybe I'll post a Show HN some time.
plain, vanilla js and some decent skills will do nearly almost everything in a cleaner and more maintainable way.
after decades of maintaining other people's stuff, dumb design by smart people beats all the other combinations.
Consider changing the behavior so that when the page is opened in the browser from the local disk, then it opens edit mode automatically, but when it's published to someone's website and accessed on the open web (check if the address is http/https), then it's a normal, read-only view expected from most pages.
Of course:
1. there should be a way to override this (a query string param or magic URL fragment) so you can look at it in edit mode, too
2. there should be a blanket exception for certain domains/URL prefixes—defaulting to keepworking.github.io (or <https://keepworking.github.io/nash/>)—so it activates edit mode on that site, too, which means that you personally don't have to do anything special to make the demo work (best if this exception is user-modifiable, so e.g. someone else can get the same behavior if they want without using the trick from #1)
I wanted the document to be edited without a separate editor.
I think those two services are more appropriate for the name "Note".
For my project, I should have used Page or Document for the project name.
I just tested your note on it, and it works nicely.
Here’s what I did: I copied the HTML of Nash, went to https://my.webstrates.net, created a new blank webstrate, opened Developer Tools, and replaced the entire DOM with the Nash HTML. Now the content persists across reloads.
To enable real-time collaboration, run this in the console:
webstrate.addSyncServer('sync.webstrates.net')
Then share the URL: https://my.webstrates.net/?s/<document-hash>@sync.webstrates...
Now it’s live-editable with others!
Webstrates works by storing and syncing changes to the DOM.
With the chance of killing my sync server, here's a Nash note on MyWebstrates: https://my.webstrates.net/?s/41W5owzLg94wDQAin4yJXGnFyKWN@sy...
I should remember it later and study more.
I think this focuses much more on the standalone HTML part of it.
In the same vein, one could also distribute P2P apps via a standalone HTML file by hooking it up via WebTorrent and using their STUN servers. Or at least, I know that it's possible in the past. Just an example, standalone HTML files can be fully fledged apps is my point.
UX suggestion. You don't need the "as read only" save options if when you do a normal save the page tells you if it has been changed. That'll get you down to 2 menu options and make me think less.
1) I’ve been getting sick of Jekyll and using it to write, because I find all the work of managing images tedious.
2) my first name is Nash, so this feels like it was made for me. :)
Very fun. Nice and lightweight. I like it.
I may submit a PR for you - I have some ideas about how I could make this more personally useful. Saving off files as Markdown is one idea I had. Would solve my “no pretty markdown editor” woes, and also allow me to chuck output from this directly into my existing GitHub Pages blog.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...
This is one that Firefox refuses to implement (a personal gripe for me)
Share uses Navigator.share (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/s...), which should invoke the browser’s “share” menu if it has one.
There's a lot of value in these kinds of things to manage your own bookmarks if you choose to without having to expose them to Google and a Google doc or something. Of course you risk losing your file.
I have been working on a free markdown editor that works entirely in the browser and can edit local files through the new filesystem access api (available in chromium only browsers).
This is probably the simplest method, put straight in the address bar:
data:text/html, <html contenteditable>
You'll need a bit longer URI in order to support unicode.
Related Hacker News discussions:
Nash appears to simplify my job, thanks!
* plus this for an easy TOC https://codepen.io/cgurski/pen/qBrNrPo
It would be nice to have a reasonably nice text editor for notes and whatnot everytime I open a new tab.
All it was missing was a self-contained WYSIWYG editor for it.
The UI of this is a lot better though, for markup-style tasks.
here in case anyone wants to check it out
edit: yup it does. Can use Ctrl + S to save via browser too instead of the save icon. Nice work.
I wanted to make/have something like this [1] and got claude to get something close as a PoC.
It's pretty cool how quickly and easily I can generate little static apps like this for ad hoc use cases. I have made a weight tracker, expense tracker, prototypes for work, cards for my wife, slides for work, etc.
For example, this slide show app: https://domsy.io/share/644305ab-d36b-40a9-80e7-f0b52abaa18b
I import it in domsy.io and give AI a text dump of everything I need, it uses the js in that html to convert to slides that I can download to pdf.
Great work.
The problem I had: when people copy/paste HTML from external sources, after a few edits, a few months later, you see that the HTML is just a horrible mix of various mixed up tags, the structure is lost, you have
<div><div><div><div><p><div>
OP, did you find a satisfying solution to this problem? A good compromise for sanitizing of copy/paste content? TL;DR: not remove the images, but clean the
<table class="cf gJ" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr class="acZ"><td class="gF gK"><table class="cf ix" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td class="c2"><h3 class="iw gFxsud"><span class="qu" role="gridcell" tabindex="-1">
So, this is my bug report. I'm not going to explain more, because this is a minimalist bug report.
I would like to understand more how this works -- where the data is stored esp if I were to self host it.