At this time, it is kind of wild that handling rich text content editing is so hard on the web. It is understandable, but a bummer, that really good content tools (google docs, office 365, medium) do not open source their editors. There are some good tools (textbox, aloha, hallo, quill) and some decent legacy ones (ck, mce), but nothing that is clearly a go-to tool that handles rich text, structured text (tables and lists), operational transforms, and sanitizing input well. It's always like: choose two.
Kudos to ProseMirror for tackling this. I can't wait to see how this works out. Also, it is kind of nice to have a way to contribute monetarily; I don't have the time (or expertise) to really contribute code. I would, given the need.
Guardian's scribe is another very good example of keeping the view separate from the model. The model produces clean data, which is the same across browsers.
Although ProseMirror isn't listed, the page provides a decent summary of various editors and reasons why they are unsuitable for certain types of in-browser editing.
The anonymous donor was Aha! (http://www.aha.io). It wasn't as anonymous as we expected because Marijn tweeted it :-), but we are excited by ProseMirror and the opportunity to contribute. WYSIWYG editing is a huge part of what our app does, and so I have always been on the lookout for better ways to build editors. Marijn's approach of using a shadow document representation (http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/prosemirror.html) is the most promising solution I have seen for a while.
Congratulations! Just added a contribution from the Overleaf[1] team who've been great admirers (and supporters) of CodeMirror -- it's a great editor and I look forward to seeing where ProseMirror goes! :)
Having struggled with through the web content editing for over a decade, I am excited that this project is moving forward and will be open source. Glad that I was able to contribute to see it happen, and thanks to everyone else who added their funds.
Kudos to ProseMirror for tackling this. I can't wait to see how this works out. Also, it is kind of nice to have a way to contribute monetarily; I don't have the time (or expertise) to really contribute code. I would, given the need.