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Comment by delroth | Hacker News Reader

"Displaying documents" and "displaying editable documents" are two completely different beasts. The web browser has never dealt well with displaying editable documents, the closest standard that exists is contentEditable and pretty much everyone agrees that it sucks and is not fit for complex use cases.

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Why can't Google work on improving `contenteditable`? It would benefit so many and the problems are well-known. It's probably even used by Google somewhere

You could easily burn five years trying to fix `contenteditable` and get nowhere. There's too much legacy and impedance mismatch. Better to start fresh at this point.

Good point. Imagine the millions of collective hours that would have been saved by everyone hacking their own text editors together.

I've heard there was actually a vocal push from Chrome for Docs to use contenteditable and even with motivated Chrome engineers they couldn't make it competitive. They basically could never fix it for Safari.

Ok, and then the new version is only supported by chrome. So they still need to keep their old rendering engine up to date. Will the other big browsers ever go along with supporting it? Or will that work be lamented as google trying to own the web and just updating standards that benefit their bottom line?

All web pages are editable currently, they are editable via Javascript. Not sure the distinction you are making is meaningful. The only thing we are missing is a good edit UI.

Isn't "the only thing we're missing is a good edit UI" lke saying "the only the the browser is missing is what Google Docs is building itself here"?

Google Docs is what happens when you write a good editing UI.

Sure, but now they are overriding the rendering layer (HTML+CSS) to benefit editing over reading.

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