Re: Musings on creating an HTML-based WYSIWYG mode

["Søren Pilgård" <fiskomaten@gmail.com>]

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On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 4:54 PM, Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:

> I'm not going to implement this any time soon, but I wondering how much
> work it would be to create a WYSIWYG mode for Emacs based on
> round-tripping through shr.
>
> I think most people who have approached this subject before have said
> "just use some text properties and store as enriched text and there you
> go", but it's just not sufficient: If you're writing a <ol> list, then
> you want this to be rendered as it should be, and it should be rendered
> as the recipient is likely to read the text.  Otherwise it's not very
> WYSIWYG, is it?
>
> So: The serialisation format would be HTML.  Whenever a user types
> something, Emacs generates HTML, asks shr to render it, and then present
> the user with the results.  This would, of course, potentially be
> horrifically slow, but we could envision strategies to only re-render
> parts of the buffer/document.
>
> Let's say the user is typing away at something resembling this
> paragraph, and then decides to make "typing" bold, so the user would go
> back to that work, mark it and issue whatever command there is for "make
> this bold".  The mode would do the change to the HTML document, ask shr
> to re-render it, and then display the results.
>
> This is, of course, not like what Emacs does normally when editing text,
> and would break a lot of invariants that people are used to.  We can
> preserve basic things like point and mark easily enough (by inserting
> special constructs into the HTML that allows us to find and restore them
> after re-generating the buffer), but I'm sure there's oodles of stuff
> that will stop working with such a radical approach.  But perhaps that's
> OK?
>
> Inserting images and the like into the buffer would be unproblematic --
> just add a few new dired commands like "copy image to WYSIWYG clipboard"
> and then yank from that "clipboard" into the buffer.  This presents
> further interesting questions about the serialisation format...  but we
> could, for instance, use MIME for that: multipart/related with the
> images stashed as cid: links.
>
> "External" images are simpler, of course.
>
> The WYSIWYG clipboard would also be necessary for when cutting and
> yanking text: If you're killing text starting from the middle of a link
> and ending up in the middle of an <ol> link, you have to ensure that you
> end up with something similar when you yank this mess somewhere else.
> And you have to ensure that everything remains valid around where you
> killed the region, too.
>
> And then there's always the interesting subject of tables, or rather:
> Side-by-side continuous regions.  Making editing commands work in those
> circumstances may be, er, interesting...
>
> So here's what I think: I think somebody (i.e., me) should try
> implementing this.  I think there are so many unknowns here that it's
> difficult to say whether this is a workable way of doing WYSIWYG in
> Emacs before you have something semi-working and get a grip on how this
> would feel in practice.
>
> But like I said, I don't have time at the moment.  :-)
>
> --
> (domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
>    bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no
>
>
>
>
The question is if it is worth the effort?
To me the greatest benefit of a WYSIWYG editor would be if I could edit in
the "finished" website eg. sort of like editing the elements in the
developer tools of  chrome/firefox. That means CSS has to be supported, and
potentially also javascript. If a website is only HTML it is easy enough
for me to visualize how it is going to look. Besides HTML rarely stands
alone now a day, it is most likely consumed by some tool and or combined
with CSS (or something compiled to CSS) and javascript (or something
compiled to javascript). And in a lot of cases i do not edit actual HTML
but some templating system complicating the issue even further.

I personally think something like skewer where a browser is updated to
reflect the current state is a lot more useful, though I havent found a way
to make it work fluidly when doing more complex backends.

Building a WYSIWYG editor in Emacs sounds like a complicated affair and I
am not sure it is really worth it as editing plain standalone HTML is
becoming a niche thing. It could be useful for HTML emails though!

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