

Bespin is a Web Based Editor from Mozilla Labs - sverrejoh
https://bespin.mozilla.com/

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jeroen
a more active thread on the same topic is here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479410>

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iigs
Off topic for Bespin, but on topic for their site, I just had one of those "if
you want your customers to use it make it easy to play with" moments. I
actually caught myself weighing the benefits of seeing it first hand vs
putting my email address into another database. Then when I clicked register
to fact check this comment it gave me (well, Chrome) the inferior-browser-F-U:

 _We would love to have you try Bespin

Unfortunately, we are using exciting new technology in HTML 5 that only
leading browsers have implemented.

We want to push the Open Web forward, so for this tech preview you will have
to use a new browser.

We have successfully tested Bespin on Firefox 3 and WebKit Nightly, so try one
of them!_

Oh well. :/

~~~
icey
What would you suggest they do if your browser doesn't support the things they
need it to support?

~~~
iigs
If a browser had been tested and found lacking in some type, I'd hope they'd
state the feature that they were relying on that was missing or buggy. The
verbiage made it sound like Chrome wasn't tested (or they're pretty arrogant
in their dismissal), but something like this would be preferable:

 _"This probably isn't going to work. What do you want to do?"

[Let me try anyway] [Get me a tested browser] [oh, nevermind]_

I understand the behavior as it stands for things like banking or medical
websites, where real life things of value are at stake and non-experts may use
it, but this is demonstrating an experimental widget on a "labs" site, where
the whole point is to try out weird new stuff in browsers.

This wouldn't have been so noteworthy, except that Netscape/Mozilla/FF just
spent a decades fighting "browser-ism" and even have a bugzilla category for
it: (<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=407187> as an example)

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davidw
I've been using a javascript based editor for this:

<http://www.heclbuilder.com>

It seems to work ok, although it's not as full featured as their system.

As for me, though... they will pry Emacs out of my cold, dead hands.

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mhartl
I hope they've succeeded in creating a viable web-based editor, which I (and
I'm sure many others here at HN) have thought about before. But it's possible
they just have their heads in the clouds...

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sverrejoh
I've always thought of code editors as a bulletproof example of apps that has
to be written in native code.

Very interested to see the code and how they did all this in Canvas in a
sensible way.

~~~
jhickner
<http://hg.mozilla.org/labs/bespin/>

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bprater
Are canvas drawn apps going to be the launching point for Web 3.0?

I'm really amazed at the performance. This is Javascript, drawing characters
pixel-by-pixel? Whoa.

~~~
jasonkester
Canvas is pretty fast for a lot of things. Check out Twiddla for an example of
what you can pull off. It's just a bit limited in what it lets you do cross
browser.

It's sort of like the days of IE4 vs NN3, with two technologies doing the same
thing with a small common set of things you can do in both. Only now it's
Canvas vs. SVG. You can accomplish a lot of stuff, and both can do a lot more,
but there's just not enough overlap right now to really build anything truly
cool.

