Are tables really hard to support? Every time I see one of these projects I check excitedly if they do but am always disappointed.
But outside of word processing, tables are just not used very much. How many times have you added a table to an email? A task manager description? A blog post? None of the big sites using Quill are clamoring for tables.
For the other newly launched editors out there, I can only imagine they made a similar calculation to not included in the launch shortlist.
I'm not sure what you mean by that, surely word processing is exactly what Quill is meant to be used for? Table use outside of word processing could just be achieved by something other than Quill entirely.
> tables are just not used very much. ... None of the big sites using Quill are clamoring for tables.
That's fair enough, I doubt they would be used in the context of writing an email, blog post (but that is debatable, I often include tables of figures/results) or a task manager description. But there are many, many back office applications that take user input through a WYSIWYG editor and put it into some kind of report. I think tables are critical here (I was also surprised to see nested lists[2] are not supported in Quill, that's also pretty important). Maybe Quill isn't aiming for those kind of use cases though, but it's just such a shame that TinyMCE is the best solution.
It's possible to do right, we used to use Redactor[1] and that handles the basic use cases extremely well while producing super clean output.
The use cases I mentioned utilizes composing text, but that's not the main product. If you want to build a CMS, add in app messaging, add formatting to textboxes, then Quill could be the answer. If you want to build the next Google Docs, out of the box Quill will probably not be enough.
My twitter stream is full of people sharing PDFs or charts or links to sites serving excel sheets.
So there's a niche there - people wanting to write a small blog post, and share a small table (no more than 4 x 10) of data.
One interesting thing I found looking for table support a while back is that there is a medium-editor-handsontable extension[2]. Something like this w/ the ability to attach a dedicated grid object (or embed a gdoc) is probably the way to go.
[1] https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor
[2] https://github.com/asselinpaul/medium-editor-handsontable
* super fast/responsive
* inline/contextual UI
* automatic transmogrification (s to ULs, ``` for code blocks, etc)
annotations
* revision tracking
* collaborative editing
* image uploads + formatting
* table insertion + editing
* task lists
* attachments
It's Dropbox's Paper editing component, but I don't think that's going to be open-sourced anytime soon. Maybe ProseMirror, Trix, ContentTools, or Quill or one of the other squajillion editors will get there someday. It really is a shame that there are so many partial solutions out there.
They simply don't have the right thing for their users. They are too complicated for the end user and if you know how to write HTML, you don't even need it, it just complicates things.