Contenteditable editors are the rage now. Medium is one. Believe it or not Fargo is based on this browser feature as well. And my latest web editor, MyWord, works with the content-editable feature as well, because it uses medium-editor which builds on it.

Medium and MyWord both store documents in HTML, Fargo does not, it stores the document in OPML, which is a simple attributed hierarchy. Here's an example of the OPML for my blog, which I edit in Fargo.

Today I came across a new open source project called ProseMirror, that will produce results like Medium and medium-editor, but will store files in a user-readable non-HTML format. Here's an essay by the author, Marijn Haverbeke, explaining the idea.

The user-readable idea is not itself new, that's what Markdown does. But presumably this will be different from Markdown, though I'm not clear exactly how it will be different.

There's a lot of confusion in this world. Most people working here aren't aware of what others are doing. It took me several months to trip across medium-editor, even though I had written several blog posts here casting for references to projects in this area. We can and must do better at avoiding duplication, reusing code, and making things simple for users, especially for the projects that are open source.

So I thought I'd mention each of these products, with links, in a blog post, and post a link to this piece in the places I know about where this is discussed. If you'd like to point everyone to other projects in this area, post a comment with a link. Maybe we can accelerate the process and create interop where possible.