I wrote an article for Opera about designMode and contentEditable: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/rich-html-editing-in-the-browser-part-1/ http://dev.opera.

I wrote an article for Opera about designMode and contentEditable: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/rich-html-editing-in-the-browser-part-1/ http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/rich-html-editing-in-the-... You are right it is messy. The API as apparently modelled over the IOleCommandTarget which is a Microsoft API for document-toolbar integration. They probably never expected it to become a cross-platform standard.