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Comment by podperson | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as someone who has just implemented a similar editor (but only dependent on jQuery) this editor has serious problems. To begin with, the UI does not respond to the selection (what will the bold button do given the current selection?) and using contentEditable DIVs will make 508 compliance horrendous (the selection is lost when a label gains focus). (Our editor allows either divs or iframes, but the latter is pretty much required for solid usability, unfortunately).

The magic is all in execCommand, but you also need to be aware of cross browser issues and execCommand's limitations (e.g. IE won't style using CSS which is a huge pain. ExecCommand can toggle bold but not background color). In the end we use execCommand to create spans and then style the spans.

Nice support for touch styling, speech input, mobile cameras, and dropping images though.

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They got around the IE stuff by saying "Requires a modern browser (tested in Chrome 26, Firefox 19, Safari 6)".

This is, of course, a synonym for "don't bother to use me in anything but hobby projects". (Or stuff which is completely mobile-focused, I suppose.)

This is the one thing, I wish more people would avoid doing. The fact of the matter is that most people use the browser their computer came with. Getting people to change that is tantamount to saying, we don't need to you as a customer.

FWIW, it does work OK so far on IE10 for me.

IE10 is pretty solid. I only wish that I could get away with supporting just it, instead of IE8+.

Not gonna be that easy at least for another couple of years. ;)

I will say, most of my stats for clients show some IE10, more IE9 and fewer IE8 these days; about 5%/65%/20% split for IE versions with 10% for older ( IE/other browsers split at about 60%/40% ), and these aren't techy sites either. So there's some good news there.

IE9 Isn't too bad actually, though sadly, a lot of eye-candy projects featured on HN break outright on it or are prevented from loading upon browser detection.

Biggest site I've got access to analytics on gets me 10/9/8 at 18%/56%/19%. So, someday!

> Getting people to change that is tantamount to saying, we don't need to you as a customer.

In many cases supporting legacy IE is more hassle than it is worth, so people genuinely don't need IE8 users as customers.

Unfortunately IE8 came with Widnows 7 so is supported as long as that is which IIRC is until 2020 (for the extended support period). Given how long it took out corporate clients to upgrade from IE6 to IE8 (some only just have) if I don't change jobs I'm going to be supporting IE8 in our applications for the next seven years at least, but many people do have the luxury of being able to say "sorry, I don't have time to be supporting that" especially when they are giving their time/effort for no financial (or similar) gain (I'm at least paid to deal with legacy IE!).

>The fact of the matter is that most people use the browser their computer came with.

No, they don't. Else it would be 90% IE.

Most people use Chrome and Firefox. And there are places in Europe where IE is almost non existent.

And even on the Mac, Chrome and Firefox users are as many or equal to Safari users.

So "most users stick to the browser the computer came with"?

Might have been true back in Windows XP days. Not for a long while.

I think that's a bit harsh. First of all, we got it to the point where it's useful for us and shared it. If it's close to what would be useful to you but not 100% there, fork, extend and submit a pull request, that is how opensource works.

I've not tested it in IE because IE is simply not on the critical path for us. That doesn't mean it does not work in IE, I've just not tested it.

After about three months, we looked at usage patterns for MindMup and decided to drop official IE support, as it represents less than 2% of our usage and most people have an alternate browser installed as well.

If IE is on the critical path for you, you could contribute by testing and submitting fixes.

I'll admit it's slightly harsh. But it's probably also true for any sort of mass market web property.

At work I'm currently having to live with supporting IE8+ [1], which I'm looking forward to eventually moving on from. Alas, the traffic isn't there yet. Plus, we're being wary about dropping IE8 since it's the last official IE for Windows XP.

As you say, it's a very site-dependent issue to care about. IE tends to come along with a more mass-market audience. If your site is aimed more at a tech-savvy crowd, you're likely to be able to not care about IE.

Of course, it gets a bit self-reinforcing there! If your early users don't use IE, you might decide that it's safe to drop IE support... and now you'll never get IE users, since they'll just think your site doesn't work.

Interesting random statistic: I have a personal medium-traffic site (about 300k visits / month) aimed at a completely non-technical crowd. IE makes up about 24% of new visits, and has the lowest bounce rate of any browser. Chrome's the single biggest browser, but all the majors are too well represented to not care about supporting.

[1] http://help.deviantart.com/38/

But if you stopped supporting those ie8 users would it detract from your bottom line? By breaking old browsers you push those people to upgrade.

ahhhh the oldest argument on the internet "If you stop supporting their browser, they'll upgrade". no, they won't, they'll just stop using your service and go else where. And yes, this would hurt your bottom line.

Citation needed.

I, for one, have switched tools (including browsers) several times to be compatible with stuff and services I care about.

>At work I'm currently having to live with supporting IE8+ [1], which I'm looking forward to eventually moving on from. Alas, the traffic isn't there yet. Plus, we're being wary about dropping IE8 since it's the last official IE for Windows XP.

If the web property is successful enough, you can ditch IE support and they'll come with something else. Or you'll get new users to replace them eventually.

> If the web property is successful enough, you can ditch IE support and they'll come with something else. Or you'll get new users to replace them eventually.

You're not a business person are you? No manager or CEO is going to take that approach if they can make more money off having some IE users (and a more complex/harder to maintain web app) than no IE users.

>You're not a business person are you?

I started my first startup while at university undergraduate. And am working on another at the money.

So, yes, I am a business person, just not the "bending backwards" for the customer business person.

>No manager or CEO is going to take that approach if they can make more money off having some IE users (and a more complex/harder to maintain web app) than no IE users

Then those managers:

1) not only do not have any pride in what they are doing (ie. they would put out shit if they could get some more money that way, instead of having a strong opinion on what they want to sell)

2) but also they might be loosing the company money, since they don't seem to understand the notion of opportunity cost.

Sure, they might make X money if the cater to legacy browser users than if they did not. At what overall cost to the company? Some messy workarounds that have your programmers working overtime? Not using nice new technologies that will give you a leg up on the competition? Spending 40% of the companies wages to fix bugs and work around issues for a 10% minority? Not iterating faster, so that in 2 years, when IE8 is < 5%, you have your food eaten by some new company building on stuff that only the latest IE support? etc etc...

>This is, of course, a synonym for "don't bother to use me in anything but hobby projects". (Or stuff which is completely mobile-focused, I suppose.

Huh? Where did you get that impression?

If your service is valuable (instead of, say, just some news site fighting for eyeballs) you can pretty much demand users to use a modern browser.

Even more so, of course, for enterprise and hosted applications, where you can specify what browser the users have to use, take it or leave it. I work on a device front-end that supports all but IE, and it's very liberating -- not to mention no customer ever cared about it enough to complain, they just switched to what he told them to use (and most were using such browsers already).

Also for open source. E.g something like Wordpress (which is used very much professionally) can use it for its admin interface, and require it's users to use a compatible browser -- and nobody will care for the few that don't want to use Chrome/FF/Safari/IE10/Chrome Frame.

With adequately modern browsers being available for Linux/*BSD/etc and XP, and being free, faster, better and more secure, you don't have to have any sympathy for users sticking to old IE versions.

And it's not like you'll be alone in it. I remember when the first web shops started ditching IE6 circa 2008-9 (with a "A list apart" manifesto and everything). That was a huge step forward. And isn't jQuery ditching old IE in version 2.0? Not to mention widely succesful projects like D3 that never supported IE to begin with.

Your service may be valuable, but if it is REQUIRED by someone to do their work then you can't get away with requiring them to change browsers.

>With adequately modern browsers being available for Linux/*BSD/etc and XP, and being free, faster, better and more secure, you don't have to have any sympathy for users sticking to old IE versions.

Sure you do, when you want to have happy users. If even a minority of your users are older/non-technical, asking them to change browsers to view your site (which they may be required to use for work) is a great way to get them to hate the damn application, provided they can even figure out how to change browsers in the first place. It makes complete sense as a designer/anyone concerned about security to force people to update their browsers, but don't forget that to the 60 year old used-to-snail-mail grandma that can totally ruin the experience.

>Your service may be valuable, but if it is REQUIRED by someone to do their work then you can't get away with requiring them to change browsers.

Actually that's when you can absolutely getting away with requiring them to change browser!

Except if you meant to write "UNLESS if it is required by someone to do their job".

You sound like you know your stuff. This is kinda how I felt too; a small addendum, less is often a good thing, but least is not better. I hope the glitches will get ironed out and will apply to textareas too though. I certainly would rather send a much smaller JS file, especially for mobile users.

Is your editor open source? Any chance you would be willing to share an example as well?

We plan to open source our editor but it's up to the client (who is amenable, just hasn't gone through procedure). Our editor is far more functional, 508 compliant, will be IE8 compatible (argh), and weighs in at about 800loc.

I wrote it rather than use something off the shelf because none of the popular choices have well-behaved UIs.

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