Comment by lewisjoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lewisjoe | Hacker News Reader

Hi Dominic, thanks for open sourcing the library. I have quite a few questions though:

1. Marijn has built an awesome open source richtext library (https://prosemirror.net/) which has a huge plugin ecosystem and bindings with a bunch of front-end frameworks (including React). Is there any specific motivation behind building one from scratch?

2. How is this different from Facebook's own DraftJS lib?

3. What's the story of realtime collaboration support with OT/CRDT? Prosemirror had this in mind when designing its state model and delta model, so it comes with out of the box support for realtime collaborations. Can we expect the same with Lexical?

4. What's the cross platform strategy for Lexical? If I store the editor's state as JSON on the server, how will I render it on devices and native desktop apps?

We've built our own library on top of Prosemirror to power the comments and feedback sections of Zoho Writer - https://writer.zoho.com

I'm always looking out for better approaches/alternatives in this space and I'm curious how different Lexical is. Thanks!

For 1. 2. see @trueadm's answer here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31022152

3. Lexical is not strictly tied to collaboration but its plugin system was built to be extensible enough to cater all developers needs. Collaboration is just another plugin (@lexical/yjs) and does listen and perform the conversion every time there's changes in the EditorState.

This model of independent plugins that can be plugged-and-played without further ado also simplifies devX as collaboration can be added later when the application is mature without the need to rethink any of the plugins that were originally created for non-collab plain/rich text.

4. Lexical Web is just the first of many. We want to port the API and fundamentals to various others platforms, including iOS for which we are already performing the initial set of testing. Cross-platform means the API, including Node's will look alike and EditorState and node's properties will be compatible even if behind the scenes the reconciler is constrained by the toolkit available on each platform (and doesn't render or behave 100% like Web's).

Thanks for the pointer. His comparison of Draft vs Lexical makes a lot of sense. I'm keener to understand the different between Prosemirror vs Lexical. He mentions that he pulled the best ideas from libs like Prosemirror.

I'm curious how Lexical is an improvement over Prosemirror's approach. As to my current knowledge,

1. Prosemirror considers state as the source of truth and syncs to subsequent states using deltas. The state keeps in sync with view allowing us to directly modify states to bring effect in the view. I hope this is the core of Lexical as well. One thing that isn't to my satisfaction is syncing ad-hoc view changes to reverse update the state. Is it better in Lexical? basically can plugins like Grammarly not screw-up Lexical's internal state?

2. ProseMirror does take a modular approach. It has zero dependencies and allows us to pull in only the necessary parts needed for our feature-set. How similar or different is Lexical in this aspect?

3. Prosemirror has a rich plugin system. Everything is a plugin - even the keyboard shortcuts. Very similar to Lexical I hope?

4. ProseMirror has a concept of Decorators i.e if you want to decorate your views without reflecting those decorations on the model. For example, if we want to underline spelling errors, but not include spelling error boundaries in the rich text's core data model. How is this dealt with in Lexical?

Essentially, I'm curious as to what areas Prosemirror could have taken a better approach!

I don't think ProseMirror has taken a bad approach. I think we've just taken a different approach when it comes to the design of things. In Lexical, you rarely concern yourself with the DOM – and typically you deal with Lexical's node API directly and that's really all you touch.

Lexical also treat its own EditorState as the source of truth. We use DOM MutationObservers to ensure the DOM matches the EditorState at all times. We do allow external mutations from things like spellcheckers update Lexical – otherwise people wouldn't be able to use Grammarly and other tools with Lexical. However, that's really constrained so that they don't overreach.

Lexical also has the notion of double-buffering. When you update Lexical, or use a node transform, you're actually mutating the "work in progress" EditorState. Once Lexical feels that the EditorState is ready, it will commit it to the DOM, and that EditorState will become immutable and will reflect what you see on the page.

quick question: I assume it ships(or supports a plugin) with a serializer to convert an editor state JSON to HTML. Does it depend on browser APIs to do so? Can it be somehow liberated out of native DOM APIs and language bindings for JSON-2-HTML in common languages like Java & Rust.

This could be a huge win for simple multi-platform rendering.

The EditorState is fully JSON serializable. You can use JSON.stringify in the browser, or an alternative on other platforms. You can then pass the stringified values around and parse them using `editor.parseEditorState()`

But, let's say I'd like to parse this stored state and send an email (as HTML) on the server?

My best guess is to use a NodeJS/V8 instance on the server to somehow transform JSON to HTML using Lexical's serializer (if something like that exists). Even this is tricky because it might depend on browser DOM apis for the conversion.

A better solution would be support language specific bindings to get HTML from JSON with zero dependecies.

Any chance you thought along these lines?

Yeah, I'd roll with Node/Deno and use Lexical that way. :)

Deno

There's no documentation on how you do that. I'm struggling with this exact point now

FB essentially stopped supporting DraftJS. I think they don't use it much internally anymore. This seems to be the replacement.

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