Facebook open sources Lexical, an extensible text editor library
&gt; Lexical is comprised of editor instances that each attach to a single content editable element.<p>Now if I only knew what was meant by <i>attach</i>, <i>content editable</i>, and <i>element</i>.  Then I suspect I don&#x27;t know what is meant even by <i>comprised</i> or <i>editor</i>.<p>To me:  A <i>bit</i> is a 0 or a 1.  A <i>byte</i> is 8 bits in a <i>sequence</i> where by <i>sequence</i> we mean the order of the bits matters.  Or in terms of pure math, a <i>byte</i> is not a set but is an 8-tuple.<p>A <i>file</i> is a sequence of bytes in a <i>file system</i> on a computer.  A leading example of such a file system is Microsoft&#x27;s NTFS -- New Technology File System.<p>Each byte can be regarded as a character in the Roman alphabet plus the digits 0-9, some punctuation symbols, and a little more, all as in the common, old definition called ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange).<p>An <i>editor</i> is a computer program that reads a file, displays the bytes as in the ASCII definition, permits a user of the program to modify the bytes and then writes the sequence of bytes to a file again on the file system.<p>Uh, what is <i>WCAG</i>?<p>In what sense &quot;minimal&quot;?<p>For &quot;rich-text features and markdown&quot;, by <i>rich-text</i> is meant Unicode, some technique in Microsoft&#x27;s program Word, D. Knuth&#x27;s word processing program TeX?  For &quot;markdown&quot;, I looked that up at Google and found<p>&quot;Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.&quot;<p>So, in particular Markdown is a computer program.  Okay.<p>Again, from Google, apparently React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces.<p>I&#x27;ve been a heavy user of text editors for years.  The editor Kedit is my most important tool.  Macros?  Sure, I&#x27;ve written about 300 of them.<p>Text?  I&#x27;ve got good experience with Knuth&#x27;s TeX:  Wrote about 50 macros for TeX and have published applied math I wrote with TeX.<p>Uh, for a new Web site, I have written code, 100,000 lines of text in Microsoft&#x27;s Visual Basic .NET using ASP.NET and ADO.NET and some for their &quot;platform invoke&quot;.  The 100,000 lines of code runs, apparently as intended.  To type in the code, I just used Kedit -- worked great.<p>But I did nothing with React or JavaScript.<p>After reading the OP and more, I still have no idea what Lexical is, what it is for, what it can do as an editor, why anyone would use it, etc.<p>I write this post because in my work far and away the biggest obstacle is getting meaningful information from the available documentation.  E.g., I spent all of yesterday on the question, what is a video adapter card?  Such cards go for $15, $65, or $500, but what the cards are and the differences are not made at all clear.  Before that, I wasted several days working with Microsoft&#x27;s programs COMP and FC, intended to compare files.  I gave up and wrote my own program to compare files.  Before that I wasted 1+ weeks mud wrestling trying to get an HP laptop and Windows 10 to write some DVDs -- after wasting several supplies of DVDs, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD+RW, I concluded that somehow HP or Microsoft just doesn&#x27;t want people writing DVDs -- millions of bytes of documentation and several YouTube videos didn&#x27;t contradict that conclusion.<p>Another problem, Microsoft&#x27;s Outlook 2003, that I used successfully for years, now won&#x27;t read my email from my ISP (Internet Service Provider).  I wrestled with that problem for some days and finally decided to use Thunderbird.  Reading email should not be difficult -- for some years I used my own email software I&#x27;d written just with the scripting language Rexx and its way to use TCP&#x2F;IP.<p>I mention these problems because they are, in the <i>world</i> of computing, simple, trivial, old, etc., should be taken for granted but all of them remain.<p>The real, original, core creative work, with some pure and applied math, for my Web site has been fast, fun, and easy, but the real problem that has nearly ruined my effort is bad documentation of the tools I must use.<p>Now along comes Lexical where I can get no idea at all what the heck they are talking about -- to me that is an example of a big problem in computing.