For those of you looking for the sourcecode for the playground, you can find it here:
https://github.com/facebook/lexical/tree/main/packages/lexic...
We also have a Discord channel you can check out:
I don’t use Facebook, but AFAIK, there are no “blog features” in the platform, are there?
Other than a WYSIWYG editor [1], what other use cases do you intend this project for?
> The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up [only on Windows XP.]
so it is the same with the modern day web frameworks as it is in the old days of windows and microsoft's dominance.
Joel Spolsky was as right in early 2002 as he is right in 2022.
As for this particular article, what is your criticism? That FB makes a rich text editor available as open source (under the MIT license)? How on earth does that mean "companies have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs"?
You can always roll your own, or use one of the many others available if this one doesn't taste right? (Also: Who on earth gains a competitive advantage from having a text editor, in 2022?)
The fact that there's draft.js, and a myriad of other existing editor libraries out there already, all of which could've been contributed to instead.
If a startup chose to base their technology on a library that is released by a major corporation, they face the risk of getting "rug pulled" (or the library updates incompatibly and now you're locked in either to using the old version, or painful upgrade to the new version).
Of course, they don't have to choose to use such a library, but if they don't then there's a community of people who then questions them on why they are spending time replicating a technology.
The point is, if a startup chose to use this library, they face the risk of having to expend time keeping up in pace (and associated cost of doing so) with facebook.
This equivalent scenario exists in someone writing against libraries released by microsoft on windows, and that's what spolsky is complaining about.
That is no different from something you do yourself, either. What you call "rug pull" is merely the point where the solution you got for free suddenly costs as much to maintain as your inhouse solution.
the big difference with a true volunteer based OSS solution, like for example, linux, is that there's many individuals involved. The decision making in that project then won't turn into what spolsky said. I wouldn't imagine the linux maintainers "rug pull", but i can imagine facebook doing a rug pull.
Major controversies that come to mind around Linux pretty much immediately are systemd, Wayland, the sound server wars. I also vaguely recall major back and forth around memory management. That's normal and expected. That's why you make "buy vs build" decisions, and any third party package is susceptible to that.
And "many individuals involved" means absolutely nothing - do you honestly believe that somehow this editor is a lone work of genius? Or that companies somehow have a coherent vision for every single detail? Have you ever worked in a large company?
A recruiter called me from your company recently, and I kind of cringed hearing him talk about the meta verse.
I realize now they probably would be much more effective with engineers if they skipped that part and just focused on all the cool work that’s being done.
https://discuss.prosemirror.net/t/differences-between-prosem...
Ultimately though, there are many similarities between the two – intentionally so. We were inspired by ProseMirror and some of its APIs and approaches. I think the biggest underlying differences are in how we tackle things from a DX perspective. We tried to bring a more composable API to making text editors work – from the plugin patterns, how updates and reads work, to how you listen for changes and react to them. Much of this was inspired by my prior work working on the React core team and from creating Inferno.
Going to have to have a play with Lexical, excited to see Yjs support!
[0]: http://tiptap.dev
It does apparently have the best live editing / collaboration features of all text editors out there.
It’s so frustrating posting code snippets to friends threads on FB
Can you talk a bit more about how this is achieved? Is it DOM obfuscation?
[1] https://discuss.prosemirror.net/t/differences-between-prosem...
Does Lexical have a feature to set arbitrary CSS on a particular selection range? I've been looking for a solution to do this since the WebKit's -[WebView applyStyle:] is deprecated as part of WebView Legacy. It isn't clear to me from glancing at the docs if RangeSelection.formatText() or other methods can handle anything or just a subset of styling code. Thanks!
Thanks for great framework and design ;)
Lexical is awesome!