ProseMirror: collaborative editing with a rigid semantic document model | Hacker News Reader

ProseMirror: collaborative editing with a rigid semantic document model

prosemirror.net

101 pointsivank23 comments

To make it perfectly clear, ProseMirror is seeking funding to go open source with 7 days left. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/prosemirror/x/1663745#/st...

Already put in what I can.

Hi, I'm the author of the project. I'll be checking for comments here for the next hour or so. Ask me anything. [Well, time to sleep. I'll check back tomorrow.]

If you check out one demo, look at this one: http://prosemirror.net/demo_dino.html

This is very cool. I'm curious if you have thoughts on this post about Medium's implementation and where you agree or diverged. https://medium.com/medium-eng/why-contenteditable-is-terribl...

I agree with most of their analysis - I linked that URL from the indygogo blurb, in fact. They are doing something similar but less general.

Woops, missed that. This is really excellent, and I just added to your funding campaign. I hope you succeed, I think this is an important piece of software to have exist and I will likely use it.

Hi marijn, thanks for the great work. From what I can see on your repo, you've written your front-end modules in ES6. But what about the back-end? In which language has it been written? nodejs?

The collab demo's backend is node.js. You could get collaboration to work by just relaying JSON between clients, but if you want to do intelligent things with the data (keep a snapshot of the current document, for example), you'll need an implementation of the document model, which exist only in JS and would be a bunch of work to port.

ok thanks. So, if you open source Prosemirror, will you also release an open source nodejs module that does all the magic for collaborative editing?

Yes. And most of that magic happens client-side, so server implementations can be thin (there's currently no general-purpose server, but I'll definitely open-source the demo).

ok thanks. donated my 5 euros :)

have used codemirror extensively for HiveMind (www.crudzilla.com)...donation will follow soon :)

Thanks for the great work!

Looks like people are checking it out: "This webpage is not available" ;)

Which one was that? (Thing seem to be working for me.)

http://prosemirror.net/demo_dino.html

Works for me, and it's just a static page served up by nginx.

Could it be your browser is trying to use IPv6? The only scenario I can think of is that I messed up the IPv6 DNS settings (which I couldn't test from home).

Switching wireless networks fixed the problem. Thanks! And sorry for the spam.

It was an IPv6 thing -- I had configured DNS properly but nginx wasn't listening on that interface. All my sites should now be IPv6-reachable.

You might consider building on top of something like ShareJS[1]'s JSON OT types rather than reinventing your collaboration substrate :)

[1]: https://github.com/share/sharejs

I am aware of those, but consciously chose not to use them. A hierarchical document model, as opposed to their linear one, has a lot of advantages, and OT is a pain to extend. See also http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/collaborative-editing.html

The JSON data type in ShareJS is not linear, though that said implementing rich text on top of it is still an open problem.

Full disclosure: I wrote the JSON data type in ShareJS :)

I put in my €5 - Marijn Haverbeke does some awesome open-source work (e.g. Eloquent JavaScript) - so I think we should definitely help chip in, if we're able to.

ProseMirror looks like it will address a number of my issues with web based content editing.

I really hope that people step forward and fund it.

Put my 5 euros.

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