Comment by antics

I know it seems that way, but it's actually not 80% of the way to a CRDT because rich text CRDTs are an open research problem. Yjs instead models the document as an XML tree and then attempts to recreate the underlying rich text transaction. This is much, much harder than it looks, and it's inherently lossy, and this fundamental impedance mismatch is one of the core complaints of this article. Some progress is being made on rich text CRDTS, e.g., Peritext[1]. But that only happened a few years ago.

Another important thing is that CRDTs by themselves cannot give you a causal ordering (by which I mean this[2]), because definitionally causal ordering requires a central authority. Funnily enough, the `prosemirror-collab` and `prosemirror-collab-commit` do give you this, because they depend on an authority with a monotonically increasing clock. They also also are MUCH better at representing the user intent, because they express the entirety of the rich text transaction model. This is very emphatically NOT the case with CRDTs, which have to pipe your transaction model through something vastly weaker and less expressive (XML transforms), and force you to completely reconstruct the `Transaction` from scratch.

Lastly for the algorithm you propose... that is, sort of what `prosemirror-collab-commit` is doing.

[1]: https://www.inkandswitch.com/peritext/

[2]: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/causal-ordering/