Inline media assets (images, etc.)

[thomasmaclean]

I'd like to contribute with the ability to include inline assets (such as images, youtube videos, etc). Is the level of effort on this unrealistically high? I see that the data model focuses on individuals characters syncing over Swarm, but has the door been left open for non-text elements?

[rocketraman]

Thanks for your interest!

The data store backend of Ritzy that allows real-time collaboration -- Swarm -- is pretty fragile, and not really amenable to making these types of changes easily. And the Swarm project, while it showed lots of promise, isn't really getting anywhere close to an enterprise-ready state, as far as I can tell.

What I'd like to see happen is:

a) the specifics of the backend becomes abstracted away from the frontend editor bits (the surface rendering and input handling),

b) a new backend (or backends) can be implemented (perhaps CouchDB+PouchDB would work well?), and

c) the frontend starts evolving features such as this one, using the new more capable backend abstraction.

I know you want to tackle (c) but I believe (a) and (b) really need to be tackled first. Any interest in doing so?

[thomasmaclean]

At this point no. Thank you for the quick reply though! It's helpful to get confirmation on what we had already more or less suspected.

We've started moving in the direction of a simple LWW Redux/Socket.io system with field-level locking (so editors can edit a page with many fields, while the field they're working on is locked). In that case, Draft.js providing a block-level editor makes the most sense.

[Tamriel]

a new backend can be implemented

What are the shortcomings of Swarm? Grishchenko is working on an updated protocol for Swarm.
Wouldn't it be easier to help him finishing Swarm?

[ztl8702]

I am interested, although I don't have much knowledge about OT.

In terms of a), is it something similar to this: https://github.com/firebase/firepad/blob/master/lib/firebase-adapter.js ? (The Firebase adapter for firepad; although they don't seem to have another backend other than Firebase.)

[rocketraman]

@ztl8702 Thanks for your interest! terms of a), is it something similar to this: https://github.com/firebase/firepad/blob/master/lib/firebase-adapter.js ? (The Firebase adapter for firepad; although they don't seem to have another backend other than Firebase.)

I'm not familiar with firepad / firebase, but in general, Ritzy uses CRDT rather than OT, and everything is character-based i.e. the CRDT data structure maintained by Ritzy is the CRDT character array. Changes to this array, both local and remote, are reflected immediately on the editing surface via event notifications.

Currently, there is a pretty tight coupling between the editor surface and the CRDT data structure. I haven't thought too much about how to abstract this, nor about how to support inline assets within the same data structure. Suggestions welcome.