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asasdasdasdsadasdsdsadsadOriginally published at www.jasonchen.me on November 2, 2014

Before building Quill, I surveyed the landscape of rich text editors. A common characteristic of all the powerful and widely used ones operated within an iframe–but the reason for this was more of a mystery. It’s hard to go against the grain when literally all the popular editors were aligned on iframes, but at the same time most of them made this configurable. What I hoped to find was a differentiator that necessitated the use of iframes.

I originally ended up deciding to go with iframes for Quill as well. But after experiencing firsthand the consequences of this choice and being able to speak directly with other editor authors, I now believe isolating Quill in an iframe is a mistake. This post is what I wished was available when I started, and a summary of all the knowledge I have gathered on the topic.

Odriginally published at www.jasonchen.me on November 2, 2014

Before building Quill, I surveyed the landscape of rich text editors. A common characteristic of all the powerful and widely used ones operated within an iframe–but the reason for this was more of a mystery. It’s hard to go against the grain when literally all the popular editors were aligned on iframes, but at the same time most of them made this configurable. What I hoped to find was a differentiator that necessitated the use of iframes.

I originally ended up deciding to go with iframes for Quill as well. But after experiencing firsthand the consequences of this choice and being able to speak directly with other editor authors, I now believe isolating Quill in an iframe is a mistake. This post is what I wished was available when I started, and a summary of all the knowledge I have gathered on the topic.

Protection

The most discussed benefit of iframes is separation from other styles and scripts on the web page. The benefit is bidirectional, but the challenging side is external scripts and styles affecting the editor. For one, it’s an unknown quantity. But also when conflicts do arise, users largely blame the editor. One early user of Quill had a script that literally monitored for and removed every <br> tag on the page.

The problem with this benefit is it only reduces the likelihood of conflict. If users wanted to mess with the editor, they still can and iframes will offer no protection. So we can only consider unintentional interference. This is a diminishing benefit as front end debugging tools become more powerful and library authors more responsible and conscious of their footprint (probably from natural selection). To my knowledge there is no widely used library that interferes with the operations of Qui