modern-editor VS stencil

> "building a text-annotation based app"

I'm going to assume that you are talking about a desktop-based webapp that is also responsive, and not a native app. I also believe you when you say that you do not know where you are getting into.

I have 10+ years of experience doing front-end, with probably over a dozen React packages self-published in npm, and also tried making a rich text editor ~6 years back[1]. I actually recommend starting with no framework at all (please read on).

Creating a rich text editor might be the hardest thing you can do in "normal" front-end (excluding some more advanced "frontend" fields like 3D or games). You can either manipulate raw cursors, which will be very tricky because I'm not even sure you have access to all the right APIs (specially on mobile), or you can attempt to use Contenteditable, which is a hell of its own[2].

"All problems start with caret placing and multi browser support" [3]

That said, I believe 90% of the complexity of your app will be here, around the actual interaction with the or <div contenteditable> that you will be using. For that, no framework will really help you, at all. So my recommendation is to first get that working, which will take weeks/months and hundreds or thousands of lines of code, and then worry about placing the little hovering boxes in their place (the "UI"), which is like 10 lines of JS/CSS[4].<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/franciscop/modern-editor" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/franciscop/modern-editor</a><p>[2] <a href="https://answerly.io/blog/my-pain-developing-a-wysiwyg-editor-with-contenteditable/" rel="nofollow">https://answerly.io/blog/my-pain-developing-a-wysiwyg-editor...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27938702" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27938702</a><p>[4] <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/q/4495626/938236" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.com/q/4495626/938236</a>

First a disclosure: I never actually used Stencil, only played with it a bit locally in a hello-world project while writing this post.

This is my main concern too.

I don't understand why tools like this "pick a winner" with a specific framework instead of rendering to Web Components with a framework wrapper, or using something like Stencil[1] that can render to any framework.

[1] https://stenciljs.com/

I was recently able to sit down with some of the core members of Ionic, who also created Stencil a toolchain for building Design Systems and Progressive Web Apps. We talked at great length how typically companies are approaching Ionic from a Design Team and need help building components. As a developer I wanted to talk about the Web Components that are used within the Design System first. There was a decent amount of surprise, so I thought I would break down what a Design System is and why it doesn't matter which end you start with, as long as you have both your Design and Development teams working together to build your Design System.

Examples like this bug me. The React example is using a high level abstraction, the web component is directly using the API. A more accurate example would show how those React calls eventually boil down to document.createElement()

I don’t think the Web Components API was meant to be used directly all the time. You can use a framework like StencilJS:

https://stenciljs.com/

You might say that this is the same vicious cycle as JavaScript frameworks. That's wrong, because Web Components are interoperable by design. Choosing Stencil or Lit or any other library is a development convenience that has little to do with the interoperability of the resulting components.

Not sure about Vue but you can in Angular, though my experience with React components in Angular has not been pleasant. Libraries such as Stencil allow you to create native Web Componets from React components.

I guess my problem is more specific to my overall architecture. I have components that when are placed in the DOM, have props rendered on them by their parent elements. I'm using stencil to do this.