[Reinmar]

> Yeah. Text based OT is pretty simple to implement, too. It’s about 200 lines of code, plus a simple network protocol.

Just for clarification, while OT for plain-text (linear model) might be simple to implement, OT for typical rich-text editors (like Google Docs) that need to rely on a tree-structured data model is a whole different story: https://ckeditor.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-creating-a-ri....

[lewisjoe]

Well, interestingly josephg (parent commentor) was part of the team that made the original gdocs editor. And I guess he worked on the Google Wave OT implementation.

[Reinmar]

Thank god I didn't question what josephg wrote regarding the text-based OT :D

I'm actually part of the team that built real-time collaboration for CKEditor 5. As the article says, we use a tree-structured representation for rich-text data and decided (many years ago) to go with OT. My guess always was that GDocs also uses a tree structure as the internal data model or that at least Google Wave did. I think I based this on a comment from a Google employee who summed up their OT implementation as hard to stabilize, even over many years.

I know it's possible to kind of represent rich-text data in form of a linear structure. This makes the implementation of the OT much much simpler. But then the editor itself becomes much more limited or you need to combine multiple instances of its model to represent more complex data. E.g., AFAIK Quill (mentioned in the other comment) does not offer stable tables implementation. Something that wasn't that big of a deal for us.

[tkone]

nah, that’s not true at all. have a look at ‘rich-text’[1] which allows for transforms on metadata in a separate stream from the main content. it’s the same basic algo used for OT on plain text.

(i was the cto at a startup which used this to create a multi-user text editor with rich text support in 2015ish)

1: https://github.com/ottypes/rich-text

[Reinmar]

What's not true at all? That more powerful rich text editors need to rely on a tree structure?