They wanted to be ambitious and to their credit they got very far. They gave a few talks on the hurdles they had to overcome. Measuring the height of text, making their own custom scrollbars, resizing woes, etc. They did a good job with a lot of it.
They admitted it was fun but too hard to get everything right. They ran into most of the problems in the spec: "Unlike Skywriter, Ace uses the DOM to render instead of the <canvas> element making it compatible with a wider range of browsers and potentially giving it a leg up in accessibility."
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
They wanted to be ambitious and to their credit they got very far. They gave a few talks on the hurdles they had to overcome. Measuring the height of text, making their own custom scrollbars, resizing woes, etc. They did a good job with a lot of it.
They admitted it was fun but too hard to get everything right. They ran into most of the problems in the spec: "Unlike Skywriter, Ace uses the DOM to render instead of the <canvas> element making it compatible with a wider range of browsers and potentially giving it a leg up in accessibility."
http://mozillalabs.com/skywriter/2011/01/18/mozilla-skywrite...
The code for Skywriter was actually really good. I used a lot of it to make my in-canvas scrollbars before moving on to my own code.