Hacker News Reader

I think there are a bunch of decent uses for that, like rich text editors (eg select text, hit ctrl-b, and the text is bolded).

There are also some sites that popup a small box above your selection with a share box. Straight to hell with those. Compulsive selectors go mad on those sites. That's you, medium.com.

View on HN

But why does a rich text editor need to talk to a website?

What if the rich text editor and the website are the same thing? What if the rich text editor is part of a larger tool that is the website?

Well, I'm not sure what you're waving at. If the website is nothing more than a RTE, then it's better (and safer) to do it in the browser. If the RTE is just part of the website, then that's a part that's better done in the browser.

Perhaps you want a RTE that doesn't depend on JS. I think that's a reasonable thing to want; but if you normally browse with JS switched off, then running into a working RTE is at least going to violate the Principle of Least Surprise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com