Comment by antics
11 hours ago
Hi Matt! Good to see you here. For those who don't know, Matt also wrote a blog about how to do ProseMirror sync without CRDTs or OT here: https://mattweidner.com/2025/05/21/text-without-crdts.html and I will say I mostly cosign everything here. Our solution is not 100% overlap with theirs, but if it had existed when we started we might not have gone down this road at all.
Your part 1 post was one of the inspirations for that :)
Specifically, it inspired the question: how can one let programmers customize the way edits are processed, to avoid e.g. the "colour" -> "u" anomaly*, without violating CRDT/OTs' strict algebraic requirements? To which the answer is: find a way to get rid of those requirements.
*This is not just common behavior, but also features in a formal specification [1] of how collaborative text-editing algorithms should behave! "[The current text] contains exactly the [characters] that have been inserted, but not deleted."
[1] http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/hongseok.yang/paper/podc16-ful...