Mozilla Labs

You hit the nail on the head. The library is meant for applications that can not use CSS layout, because the algorithm they need is not possible in CSS, or because they are rendering to a context that does not have layout management such as Canvas or SVG. Think of projects like Mozilla Bespin (https://mozillalabs.com/bespin/) which uses Canvas for drawing its editor. Having standard layout algorithms available would be a great help there.

I was quite hesitant about making the jQuery plugin public because I was fearing reactions such as this. It was meant as a demo, and a nice way to test the layout managers. For a long time I had a message on the jQuery plugin page stating something along the lines of "please, please, consider using CSS before you use this plugin."

The nice thing about programming against a layout manager API is that you can easily write new algorithms while the (DOM) interface remains the same. It would be trivial to write a layout manager that does layout like Masonry. As another example, I'm currently working on a pack layout which can be used to pack small images into a larger one (e.g. CSS sprites,) and a layout manager that implements the CSS box layout module. I was also considering a text layout based on my TeX line breaking work (http://www.bramstein.com/projects/typeset/.)

Implementing good text controls in Canvas is a fool's errand. The spec itself warns against it:

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/the-canvas-element.html#best-practices

They wanted to be ambitious and to their credit they got very far. They gave a few talks on the hurdles they had to overcome. Measuring the height of text, making their own custom scrollbars, resizing woes, etc. They did a good job with a lot of it.

They admitted it was fun but too hard to get everything right. They ran into most of the problems in the spec: "Unlike Skywriter, Ace uses the DOM to render instead of the <canvas> element making it compatible with a wider range of browsers and potentially giving it a leg up in accessibility."

http://mozillalabs.com/skywriter/2011/01/18/mozilla-skywriter-has-been-merged-into-ace/

The code for Skywriter was actually really good. I used a lot of it to make my in-canvas scrollbars before moving on to my own code.

Why? Because of all the reasons most people switched away from Firefox to Chrome to begin with...

Firefox is slow, klunky and the UI is deplorable. Mozilla and also hates native platforms and therefore Firefox doesn't respect my OS. For instance - since the beginning of time, every Windows program let me close the window by double-clicking in the upper left corner. People have been asking Mozilla to change this for years and got ignored. Meanwhile, the Chrome team changed it immediately upon request when one of their builds lost the ability.

IMO, Mozilla is a second-rate has-been that turns out nothing but useless crap like Rust and Servo that nobody needs or uses since there are much higher quality alternatives already in existence - http://www.mozillalabs.com/en-US/projects/

Other companies with projects named PRISM:

Palantir https://docs.palantir.com/metropolisdev/prism-overview.html

Mozilla (inactive) https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/prism/

CriticalBlue http://www.criticalblue.com/prism-technology.html

Goodwill http://www.goodwilltalentbridge.com/tb/projectPrism.aspx

Universities with projects named PRISM:

Texas Tech http://www.texastech.edu/it/prism.aspx

Georgia Tech http://pag.gatech.edu/prism

Princeton http://www.princeton.edu/prism/industry/industrial_affiliate/

While many of these projects have nothing to do with technology, they illustrate a point: PRISM was a great name for a project. The fact that Facebook has a "Project Prism" too is just coincidence.

I was one of the first fellows of their WebFWD program back in 2013 [1]. I'm sure a lot has changed in the last decade but it was refreshing to find partners who were not venture capitalists for our for-profit open source company.

Sadly, the other partner wound down last year. The Shuttleworth Foundation - funded by Mark - was super critical for us. they provided almost $1m in funding.

Both provided contacts for legal, marketing, etc.

I wish we had more of these initiatives which weren't so focused on profit.

[1] https://www.mozillalabs.com/webfwd/

I never said that this application shouldn't exist; I just don't see the point in making it a web application

And that's exactly what I was responding to. A web application is somebody else's problem, from start to finish. In this case, everything but the writing. Any other solution has its own constraints and so on that become your problem, which quite often isn't worth the expenditure of attention.

What I'm really saying is that this application seems like the perfect candidate for http://mozillalabs.com/prism/

http://fluidapp.com/ + 30 seconds.