Gutenberg: "Headless TinyMCE"

[androb]

This has been asked for, need to understand the requirement more.

[jasmussen]

Thanks Andrew. @iseulde can you help clarify what this could entail? Thanks.

[ellatrix]

A "headless" version of TinyMCE would be the current version but without any UI, plugin loader, and stuff like that. Just a package that fixes bad browser manipulation in contentEditable, maybe with some tools/API to make it easier to use. Ideally it's also in npm and doesn't create global variables.

[aduth]

Related: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C02QB2JS7/p1487185410004370

[androb]

This was added in TinyMCE 4.7. Setting the theme to false will cause TinyMCE to be headless.

[dsifford]

@androb Would you be able to point us to an example of this API? I'm trying to run headless using Jest/jsdom and there are tons of errors being thrown by the core tinymce library because of all of the DOM APIs that it needs.

I tried stubbing window.matchMedia and that worked, but then an error was being thrown for tinymce's util.toAbsPath because the base URI is not defined. I'm assuming this is going to become a giant chain of stubbing DOM APIs if I keep proceeding down this path.

Does this need to run in an actual headless browser? Will jsdom not cut it?

CC: @spocke

Thanks in advance.

[spocke]

What we mean by headless is that it has no ui similar to headless browsers like phantomjs. JSDom is a js implementation of the dom that is very limited so only parts of a complex editor like tiny would be able to support that and we don’t have that on our roadmap. Tiny and all it’s tests works in a headless browser you can run our tests command line using grunt for example. So if you could run your tests though phantomjs it should work fine.

[dsifford]

I see. Thanks for the clarification.