Saturday, August 4, 2018

contenteditable without cognizance

Not since I discovered QR codes in 2009 have I been so surprised.

HTML has an attribute named contenteditable which can be applied to any part of a web page to allow the person viewing it in a browser to edit that part of the page.

This first appeared in Internet Explorer version 5.5 and so has been around since late in the previous millennium. It is now part of HTML version 5, and has been since at least 2008. That's ten years!

Try it out in the paragraph below, copied from a Wikipedia page (just click somewhere in the text and start changing it).

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

I recently began using QR codes at work, including generating them to identify various things.

Today, I began using contenteditable of which I had not been cognizant earlier. It is quite easy to use and allows me to let visitors to my websites edit previously submitted comments.

How could I not have known about this before today?