Words instead of characters: collaborative rich text without Yjs

Alice and Bob are editing the same note. Both are offline, on a train or on a plane. Alice makes a word bold, Bob fixes a typo three words further along. Later the devices sync. The question that research and frameworks have been wrestling with for fifty years: what now?Merge the two HTML strings naively and you end up with torn markup and lost text. The interesting question is not whether this can be solved, but at which level you break the text apart. That is exactly where the approaches differ.Rather try it out right away?Here is the editor running as a live demo.A short look backFirst, so that expectations are right: I am not an expert in this field. What follows is my rough overview as a developer who was looking for a solution that fits, not a textbook account. Anyone who wants to know precisely will find far more depth in the sources I link to.Operational Transformation (OT), the technique behind Google Docs, is the classic from the late 80s. The idea: every edit is an…