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Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> Give me a better word that’s know to more people, I’d love to change it!

Thank you for being flexible :-)

Headless literally means "gui-less" (without a gui) and has had the same meaning since 1998 or so so it's probably not a good idea to reuse the word to mean something else in the same context.

I would go with either "style-less" (which is a bit awkward to say") or "effortless", which is better even if not totally accurate.

With "effortless" you fully capture how easy it is to use.

> With web artisans I wanted to point out it’s for people who really care about every detail.

You can keep artisan - it looks correct in this context.

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tiptap comes without a graphical user interface. It’s an API and you have to build the gui. Are you sure headless is so wrong?

> tiptap comes without a graphical user interface. It’s an API and you have to build the gui. Are you sure headless is so wrong?

Unless I misunderstood the example, all you have to do is instantiate it to make it work with a default look.

If "using the API" is headless, then everything is headless because they all have an API, including things like Qt, WxWidgets, etc. This is obviously not the case.

3 out of 80 examples have styling applied for demo purposes.

The package comes without CSS and markup as explained on the frontpage.

> Headless > It’s headless and comes without any CSS. You are in full control over markup, styling and behaviour

> It’s an API and you have to build the gui.

It has an API, but after a quick peek at the page, I wouldn't say it 'is' an API. I'd call it a library.

Do the entry points of a library no longer constitute its “API”? That is the very origin of the term.

Yes, I'm confident it's wrong because it re-use a word in a way that will confuse. It implies it'll be used without a GUI and the first thought is not to think "oh, they must mean it doesn't come with its own GUI". Lots of others things that have an API do not get called headless - presumably as they're aware of the existing use of headless and thus don't want to confuse people.

Maybe you could explain it's a backend for an editor.

Or maybe "unstyled"?

Headless is definitely wrong.

I saw the title of this story and assumed that tiptap was going to be a component that somehow backed up various WYSIWIG editor-clients. That would be headless. (It's even useful -- the transaction system + collaboration server is theoretically a thing that could back up other clients, after all, though in practice it's going to force enough design decisions onto the clients that it's not really worth it.)

Tiptap does come with a graphical user interface, insofar as it looks like the most minimal possible use of it (from your "Minimal setup" example) will create a contenteditable surface to write in. Said surface is the "head".

I'd consider "flexible", "customizable", or "unopinionated". "Unstyled" was suggested, but although it's true I think it's misleading -- the need to construct your own toolbar goes beyond what that implies.

effortless is great, I was going to say completely customizable but effortless is better.

Styleless is bad because to be without style is to be bad.

the effortless editor you can customize every aspect of.

effortless sounds good, but is it really true here? If I have to style the complete editor myself that sounds like a lot of effort. I would go in the direction of "The fully customizable editor" or something similar.

doesn't effortless mean exactly the opposite? drop in, fire and forget.

"non-opinionated WYSISWYG Text Editor" ?

tiptap is very powerful, but definiteley not for people looking for an effortless solution. Yes, that’s what I think too.

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