So, I've been working with rich text editors in particular recently, and I can tell you one thing: contenteditable is a gigantic pain in the rear. It's uneven a

So, I've been working with rich text editors in particular recently, and I can tell you one thing: contenteditable is a gigantic pain in the rear. It's uneven across platforms what it transforms user intent into (control-B: do you get a <b> or a <strong>?), it handles paste events sloppily, and marking inner fragments as not contenteditable (say an image embed, atmention or some other block) is weird, especially if that item is the last thing in the list. Contenteditable is so annoying that the first thing most rich text editors seem to do is make their own selection state manager, because the native range implementation in the DOM is crap. Medium in particular pretty loudly got rid of it entirely, and that's the direction most modern web-based rich text editors are going. So. The best thing to do here is find some kind of framework that helps you map from user intent into mutating a data model, and a separate way to translate that data model into the DOM. This sounds like a framework to me, and it especially sounds like one if you want it to work on lots of platforms. Similarly, sure: I don't need a framework to do DOM manipulation. But I've been using angular (1.x) for a few years now, and I can say: it makes life a lot easier. If I don't have to debug lines of javascript looking for where different elements get injected into the DOM, I'm happy. I can just look at the template file for the html code I'm editing and see where classes get programatically changed based on state, not because I'm deep inside some MutationObserver, but because I can read an ng-class directive. Easy pie. I sure don't need a framework. I could also program in ones and zeroes. Speaking as someone who's been doing web stuff since the 90s, where the first framework I ever wrote was a bunch of DIY C libraries to make writing cgi-scripts easier, I can say with all honesty: using a framework makes life easier. Sure, it's annoying to learn, and sometimes the opinions of the framework are different from your opinions. That's why I use angular instead of ember (because I'm not a rails person, for the most part). Take your pick, learn it well, and it will make your life easier. And if you're that worried about the weight of your library, stop loading so many hero images uncompressed. (I will grant edge cases where library size is a big deal, but it's more of a premature optimization thing in most places, especially now that tree shaking is starting to make its way back into our build tooling).