Online rich-text editor

The aim is to reduce the effort for users trying to express their formatting directly as valid HTML markup.

Internet Explorer was the first to add a special "designMode" which allowed formatted parts of a document to be edited by the user using a cursor.

[2] The technical capabilities needed to implement an online rich text editor were not covered by the W3C specifications for HTML4.

Nevertheless, popular services like Gmail and WordPress have relied on rich text editing as their main user interface.

With HTML5, some standardization was made on a DOM property called "contentEditable"—which resembles Internet Explorer's original extension.