Authoring

Contribute your ideas and follow the discussion about the choice of authoring environment

Criteria
Feature Gaps
Analysis
- Project
- Fundamentals
- UX
- Tech
- Misc
- Prose
- Dillinger
- Aloha
- …

Criteria

The authoring environment should be:

Open source
Running in the browser

6 potential candidate software are considered with these additional criteria:

Markdown support
Git support
Inplace editing
Actively maintained
Extensible, it should be easy to add functionalities. See Analysis below

	Markdown	Git	Inplace	Active
Prose	Yes	github	No	No
Gitbook	Yes	git	No	Yes
Dillinger	Yes	github	No
Aloha			Yes
Pen Editor	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
ContentEditable	No	No	Yes	Yes

Feature Gaps

Based on the design goals the following features should be implemented:

Non negotiables

Media: Prose for instance manages media if in a single folder. Should have some library features.
Links: Are too easy to break, or complicated to create. Should be checked client side.
Metadata: Even if content is made of several blocks (including reused blocks), they should be invisible and be previewable as a whole, carry invisible metadata and allow various degrees of structure to be enforced.

Nice to haves / Possible Easy Wins

Iconography: Having an icon library like glyphicons or font-awesome would be… not bad.
Forms: After all that’s what GFM - [ ] are.
Diagrams: Mermaid is where it’s at.
Offline: Work offline or with an unhosted approach (remote storage git layer?)

Unicorns

Let’s say goodbye to google docs.

Realtime collaboration: Substance where have you gone… OT over Git please.
Spreadsheet editing: Quip style of course. There are a number of good looking spreadsheet.js approaches.

Analysis

Project

	OSS	Active	Comment
Prose	Yes	No	Huge community of contributors and users
Gitbook	Yes	Yes
Dillinger	Yes
Aloha
Pen Editor	Yes	Yes
ContentEditable	No	Yes

Fundamentals

	Markdown	Git	Branches	Metadata
Prose	Yes	Github	Yes	YAML/Frontmatter
Gitbook	Yes	Yes
Dillinger	Yes	Yes
Pen Edit	Yes	No
Substance	No	No
Realms	Yes	No
PupPub

UX

	InPlace	Preview	Toolbar	Media	Metadata	Offline	Focused
Prose	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Gitbook	No	Some		Yes	No	Yes?	Some
Dillinger	No			Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Pen Edit	Yes	Yes		No
Substance	No	Yes		Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Realms	No	Yes		No toolbar	No	No	No
PupPub

Tech

	Lang	Frontend	Backend	Modular	Style	Comments
Prose	JS	Backbone	Quite Stateless	Good	Simple.	Bad code climate. Insecure deps.
Gitbook
Dillinger
Pen Edit
Substance
Realms
PupPub

Misc

	Offline	Desktop	PDF	Dropbox	G Drive	Comments
Prose					No	Also has a table editor.
Gitbook		Yes	Yes		Yes
Dillinger	Yes		Yes	Yes	Yes
Aloha
Pen Edit					Yes
ContentEditable					Yes

Prose

Dillinger

AngularJS - HTML enhanced for web apps!
Ace Editor - awesome web-based text editor
Marked - a super fast port of Markdown to JavaScript
Twitter Bootstrap - great UI boilerplate for modern web apps
node.js - evented I/O for the backend
Express - fast node.js network app framework @tjholowaychuk
Gulp - the streaming build system
keymaster.js - awesome keyboard handler lib by @thomasfuchs
jQuery - duh

Content as Code