FIX #633 : render preview in an efficient way

[zipang]

Markdown editors like HackMD already do it : the preview method must not alter inchanged nodes or the writing experience becomes impossible as the preview zone is rendered again and again with iframes being destroyed and recreated again...
A virtual dom solution is not an easy solution in our case as very few markdown parsers do generate a virtual dom representation.
Google incremental-dom package is a better solution to the problem : it effectively updates only the required nodes.
A demonstration of the new renderPreview() implementation is available here : https://zipang.github.io/markdown-bundle/
In this page, the user can type new text while an embedded video in the preview is playing.
whereas the same document is rendered here with the CDN version of SimpleMDE : https://zipang.github.io/markdown-bundle/demo/simplemde.html

[markentingh]

There is no reason why this should still be waiting for a merge.

[markentingh]

@zipang, we might as well fork this project, rename it, and own it so that the community can flourish. I'm currently using SimpleMDE in my own project Legendary, and I'd like to expand on SimpleMDE to make it highly optimized and extensible, but the repo owner seems to have abandoned the project.

[CWharton]

Project forked at inscryb-markdown-editor. Would love to have this PR if you have the time.

[dsandstrom]

@zipang You did a really good job with this PR and merging fixes into your branch: https://github.com/zipang/simplemde-markdown-editor/tree/incremental-dom

This editor is great, but your version is even better. I have some bug fixes for it, but not sure where to submit them. I will keep them in my fork for now. https://github.com/dsandstrom/simplemde-markdown-editor

@sparksuite Do you think you can add a maintainer since you aren't able to keep up? Or maybe @zipang can take over?

cc @WesCossick

[zipang]

@CWharton, @dsandstrom, @markentingh : Hi there ! 😃
I'm glad that this PR received your attention, but i'm really confused right now : which repo should be maintained ?
So i've mailed @WesCossick to ask him to add all PR authors to the collaborators of the repo, which would allow us to freely merge all the work that has been done (i have seen many other forks out there...)
Please, do like me and email Wes : [email protected] or [email protected]

[CWharton]

I had a chat with @WesCossick on twitter back in January. He stated, "Unfortunately keeping up with PRs and associated bugs with changing the code aren’t something we have the time for currently. As it stands, SimpleMDE is a fully-featured and reliable project suitable for production environments. We’ll review PRs once our team has the capacity to handle them well." This is why we moved on with another project.

[dsandstrom]

Their point of view is fair. They feel the editor is accomplishing what they want to accomplish and anything else will just add bugs.

That being said, I want a more advanced editor. I tried out a few, but I picked this one because it wasn't WYSIWYG, but still gives some visual feedback after adding markdown tags.

It sounds like I'm not the only one that feels this way, so it sounds like a fork is in order. Or find one that is similar. @CWharton What are you using instead?

I also think discussion should move to an issue. I'll let someone else that is more invested in this project start one.

[CWharton]

@dsandstrom There has been several talks about a fork but I could not find one that i felt was active. So a while back we at Inscryb decided to take on the task at inscryb-markdown-editor. First goal was to update the editor packages that had some security concerns. Next we wanted to bring some of the PR here and bring them over there. After that we have a few proposals we will present to the community and move on from there. We would love for anyone interested in a maintained version of this project to join us.

[axe312ger]

I reimplemented @zipang's code into easymde: Ionaru/easy-markdown-editor#79