Text editing remains one of the most important but least improved features in modern software.

Users’ expectations of software for writing on the web are still defined by Microsoft Word, a 30-year-old juggernaut that was designed in an era when the ‘paperless office’ was still a fantasy.

From a technical perspective, things aren’t much better. Current solutions for writing on the web remain dominated by contentEditable: the HTML attribute that lets users edit the content of an element. contentEditable forms the basis of most web-based text editors.

Fundamentally, though, contentEditable isn’t fit for purpose. It was designed to turn browsers…