LibreOffice to go Android and HTML5
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Mozilla Bespin became Mozilla Skywriter became "fuck it, we shouldn't have used HTML5 Canvas as a text editor" and merged with Ace, which uses plain old divs and not Canvas. It's not glamorous. But it's sane. (http://ace.ajax.org)
The Canvas spec has an entire section devoted to why making a complex text editor rendered in Canvas is a bad idea:
* Mouse placement of the caret has to be reimplemented.
* Keyboard movement of the caret has to be reimplemented (possibly across lines, for multiline text input).
* Scrolling of the text field has to be implemented (horizontally for long lines, vertically for multiline input).
* Native features such as copy-and-paste have to be reimplemented.
* Native features such as spell-checking have to be reimplemented.
* Native features such as drag-and-drop have to be reimplemented.
* Native features such as page-wide text search have to be reimplemented.
* Native features specific to the user, for example custom text services, have to be reimplemented.
* This is close to impossible since each user might have different services installed, and there is an unbounded set of possible such services.
* Bidirectional text editing has to be reimplemented.
* For multiline text editing, line wrapping has to be implemented for all relevant languages.
* Text selection has to be reimplemented.
* Dragging of bidirectional text selections has to be reimplemented.
* Platform-native keyboard shortcuts have to be reimplemented.
* Platform-native input method editors (IMEs) have to be reimplemented.
* Undo and redo functionality has to be reimplemented.
* Accessibility features such as magnification following the caret or selection have to be reimplemented.
So basically for the cost of leveraging an existing library (Broadway), you get LibreOffice in places you wouldn't previously, and it's much better than the alternatives (rewrite LibreOffice from the ground up, or have no mobile solution at all). Sure it's not perfect, but practicality > correctness.
Since then browsers implementations have advanced such that this is no longer so -- it didn't make the initial choice necessarily bad.
This stuff is GPL'd, so I don't see how it takes control away from users. On the contrary, this would give you far more control than you get from using any other solution, since you can host it yourself.
And yes, it's like VNC, but I don't see how it would be inherently more bloated.
Personally I welcome the trend towards software that can be used on any machine with a browser.
If you take GPL code and run it on a server, you don't have to release your modifications.