There's brief-but-straightforward documentation for Content Editable over at Mozilla Developer Network, and an interactive ContentEditable demo at HTML5 Demos. These features were popular enough, in fact, that they were rather quickly reverse-engineered and added to competing browsers.įor some interesting background on this history, see Mark Pilgrim's ' The Road to HTML5: contentEditable' post at The WHATWG Blog. Microsoft included this functionality in Internet Explorer with the intention that developers could use it to develop rich text editors, and they did. Editing Text in a contentEditable Element Users could edit the text within an editable element or page, and the browser also provided API hooks for commands that enabled features like bold or italic styling, adding links, and so on (see Figure 1). DesignMode made the entire document editable, while contentEditable made a specific element (and its child elements) editable. The state of Web content editing changed significantly with the release of Internet Explorer 5.5, in 2000, which introduced the designMode and contentEditable attributes.

Later we got the ability to submit plain text back to the server, which might build a new page with the new content. or at least a writer with some technical expertise in HTML markup. Think about it: At one time, content had to be built into a Web page by a programmer. Maybe I'm going out on a limb with this one, but it seems to me that rich text editors represented an important step forward in moving the World Wide Web from a broadcast-oriented, publisher/programmer-focused endeavor to an interactive, content-remixing medium where we can extend and build upon each other's expertise and inspiration.

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