Having worked on rich text editors for several years, I've developed a strong sense of the limitations of native HTML capabilities.
Popovers and dialogs are indeed useful; our project's color picker popup has been moved to a popover, which is much cleaner than manually managing z-index and closing it by clicking outside.
However, contenteditable is an exception. While it appears to be a native rich text editing capability of browsers, the implementation varies significantly across different browsers. The same operation will produce completely different HTML in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Not to mention mobile browsers with their various unpredictable input behaviors. This is why editors like ProseMirror and Wordgard don't trust contenteditable output; instead, they maintain their own document model and only use contenteditable as an input layer.
While native HTML capabilities are improving, for complex interactive scenarios, such as rich text editing and clipboard parsing, JavaScript is still essential.
Popovers and dialogs are indeed useful; our project's color picker popup has been moved to a popover, which is much cleaner than manually managing z-index and closing it by clicking outside.
However, contenteditable is an exception. While it appears to be a native rich text editing capability of browsers, the implementation varies significantly across different browsers. The same operation will produce completely different HTML in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Not to mention mobile browsers with their various unpredictable input behaviors. This is why editors like ProseMirror and Wordgard don't trust contenteditable output; instead, they maintain their own document model and only use contenteditable as an input layer.
While native HTML capabilities are improving, for complex interactive scenarios, such as rich text editing and clipboard parsing, JavaScript is still essential.