Not only is it technically possible, but it's being used reliably in production environments.
> ... have it editable in a way that you can quickly hook up your "bold" button, etc.
Today in any current browser you can do execCommand("bold") to embolden text.
> The problem is that it's implemented in five completely separate ways by five different browser vendors. Many things are implemented in mutually exclusive ways.
Implementing a unified XHR wrapper could also make someone aggravated, as there are different -- sometimes completely incompatible -- implementations across browsers. Having varying implementations comes with the territory and is not an indication of brokenness.
You keep making these blanket statements without providing any examples. Can you give one example of actual code that needs major workaround? Your off-the-cuff example of a bold button makes me wonder if it wasn't five years ago when you last tried to make this happen.
If anyone is interested in a more disciplined understanding of the various levels of support across browsers, here's Quirksmode's take on it: http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/execCommand.html
Today in any current browser you can do execCommand("bold") to embolden text.
Indeed. And it will work, provided you haven't used Backspace to collapse your selection to the start of a DIV in IE. And you haven't selected your text by SHIFT+Left Arrow such that it oversteps the beginning of an editable paragraph and enters the no-mans-land between it and the non-editable div before it in Firefox. And you haven't previously issued an "insertorderedlist", causing the known issue in IE. And that you didn't issue your contentEditable=true as the result of the mouse click that placed the caret inside the text of a H1 tag.
And dozens of other tiny things that continually jump out to bite you that need to be worked around in every single browser just to get it to work.
So yes, I'll grant you "technically possible", but not anything beyond that.
> ... have it editable in a way that you can quickly hook up your "bold" button, etc.
Today in any current browser you can do execCommand("bold") to embolden text.
> The problem is that it's implemented in five completely separate ways by five different browser vendors. Many things are implemented in mutually exclusive ways.
Implementing a unified XHR wrapper could also make someone aggravated, as there are different -- sometimes completely incompatible -- implementations across browsers. Having varying implementations comes with the territory and is not an indication of brokenness.
You keep making these blanket statements without providing any examples. Can you give one example of actual code that needs major workaround? Your off-the-cuff example of a bold button makes me wonder if it wasn't five years ago when you last tried to make this happen.
If anyone is interested in a more disciplined understanding of the various levels of support across browsers, here's Quirksmode's take on it: http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/execCommand.html