Collaborative editing of HTML with TinyMCE not going to happen soon
PloneConf2012 xmpp tinyMCE ploneTL:DR: Collaborative editing doesn’t work well with XML/HTML. Right now, the solution seems to be to use Markdown instead.
During my talk on XMPP applications in Plone, someone asked whether I was aware of any issues with regards to collaborative editing in TinyMCE.
I don’t exactly remember my reply, but it came down to “no”, I wasn’t aware of any problems with it. Just the next day however, at the sprints, I encountered a fundamental problem with regards to collaborative editing of Rich Text through TinyMCE.
The problem lies in the fact that the Diff-Match-Patch is meant for plain text only. It has no concept of structured content such as the a DOM-tree and can therefore create problems when one tries to patch HTML content. It seems that mainly two things can happen. Firstly, because your HTML nodes are not atomic, they can be broken by the patching algorithm inserting text inside them. Secondly, the patching can result in HTML nodes appearing in the wrong order. (See what the author of Diff-Match-Patch had to say about it on the project page and his excellent explanation on stackoverflow).
Ideally one should use a patching algorithm that is tree-based and which will maintain the integrity of the DOM-tree. When using the plain text algorithm, there are however two approaches to try and mitigate the above issues.
- Strip all HTML tags, diff-match-patch the resulting plain text and re-insert the original tags.
- Replace all tags with Unicode chars outside of the used range (thereby making them atomic), apply diff-match-patch and then restore all tags.
The problem with the first approach is that your markup is now immutable. So any markup changes a collaborator makes (e.g bold, italics, heading or other formatting) will be discarded. I think this is a dealbreaker and rules out this approach.
The problem with the second approach is that even though your HTML nodes are now atomic, they might still appear in the wrong order.
Because of this, I think trying to do collaborative editing via an HTML-based Wysiwyg editor is not the way to go. Instead, a Markdown editor (such as Epic Editor) seems to be the way to go. Markdown is plain text, and therefore doesn’t suffer from the problems mentioned above.
I think I have created the impression at the Plone conf that production-ready collaborative editing via TinyMCE will soon be a reality, and for that I would like to apologize.
