Hacker News Reader

Comment by hitekker | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't use Quill.

The developers are passive-aggressive to the notion of rendering Quill content outside of the Quill Editor, having ripped out the APIs to do so from newer versions, and silencing conversations in their Github Issues.

You can see the latest flare-ups here: https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/993

The project also has secondary smells such as inventing weird names for existing concepts; 'Delta', for example instead of 'data source' or something more intelligible.

Lastly, it markets itself as feature-complete, but has failed to implement support for something as basic as tables, which have been repeatedly requested for the past 3 years.

Personally, I would be afraid to build anything mission-critical upon it.

View on HN

Quill is now a very popular project on Github, in the top 250 of all projects. A lot of people want to add their two cents to popular project and unfortunately the volume is far too high for a) me to respond to every single attempt at adding said cents and b) Github Issues's linear commenting UI makes all attempts at adding two cents confusing and cluttering. With this I prioritize the question that was asked, and specifically the concerns the OP raises.

I have repeated many times that the removal of getHTML was because it was a passthrough function that added no additional value to Quill. You can look at the code history and the implementation of getHTML to confirm this fact. It has nothing to do with the desire to remove functionality as no functionality was removed.

I'm confused why Delta is a bad name, since the word delta means change, variation or difference and that's seems to describe what it is: a change to Quill's content. Data source on the other hand is unspecific and even misleading. Naming is hard though and other readers can find out what Deltas are here https://quilljs.com/docs/delta/ and decide for themselves.

Tables was reported as a feature request by me early in the project life because it is a known feature of Word but only years later did users indicated strong interest in it in Sept 2016. I believe in community contribution to open source so I decided to give the community a chance to build it so I wrote offered detailed implementation guidance: https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/117#issuecomment-244.... The fact that this user had seemingly urgent need for it and was employed by a large public company with resources also contributed to this decision. Valuable exchanges were had in the Issue and multiple users has fully implemented it for their companies to varying levels of feature richness depending on their requirements. An official canonical implementation is coming in 2.0: https://medium.com/@jhchen/the-state-of-quill-and-2-0-fb38db....

Your response is mostly reasonable and your parent sounds overdramatic. However the github thread looks quite bad for you.

For the record, I know jchen has already responded but I thought I'd add my bit here.

I display html content based on quill data all the time. I've done it using quill to generate the html source, by writing a separate library to convert from Delta representations to html strings, and most recently as an angular 2 webcomponent (since angular 2 doesn't really like it when you inject html strings outside of it's lifecycle, if you want the resultant DOM nodes to be angularized).

All three ways have worked well. Personally, I like this last way the most, but owing to the vagaries of angular template compilation it is difficult (or impossible) to really abstract it into a standalone library (because the top level template needs to reference any possible custom components that are local to your app, such as an atmention thing that pulls in an avatar image from some profile data or whatever)).

Anyway, I use quill, and have used it since we'll before 1.0 days. At the time, it was the only game in town for emitting Deltas that could be wired into an OT engine, and it still works really well in my concurrent rich text editor for an internal cms/forum.

That said, prosemirror also looks pretty rad, and I will also be checking that out eventually also. I feel like there's room for both in the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com