designMode

By  on  

Every once in a while I stumble upon an API or browser setting that I can't believe ever existed. Such examples can be seen in the numerous String.prototype properties such as bold, italics, and even blink, which wrap given string text in their representative HTML tags. Bizarre.

It was recently brought to my attention the document.designMode API: an on|off switch that acts almost like a contentEdible attribute for the entire document. You can toggle designMode by simply changing the setting:

document.designMode = "on";

With the designMode setting on, you can edit page text, drag and drop assets, and generally cause chaos on the page. This is really nice for prototyping; I'd have loved to have known about this while doing client work.

While I see uses for this API, it does feel a bit bizarre. I'd have liked to have known the origins of this property and its use cases. Have ideas about how you'd use it? Share!

Recent Features

  • By
    JavaScript Promise API

    While synchronous code is easier to follow and debug, async is generally better for performance and flexibility. Why "hold up the show" when you can trigger numerous requests at once and then handle them when each is ready?  Promises are becoming a big part of the JavaScript world...

  • By
    Write Simple, Elegant and Maintainable Media Queries with Sass

    I spent a few months experimenting with different approaches for writing simple, elegant and maintainable media queries with Sass. Each solution had something that I really liked, but I couldn't find one that covered everything I needed to do, so I ventured into creating my...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools FontChecker Plugin

    There's a very interesting piece of code on Google Code called FontAvailable which does a jQuery-based JavaScript check on a string to check whether or not your system has a specific font based upon its output width. I've ported this functionality to MooTools. The MooTools...

  • By
    Flexbox Equal Height Columns

    Flexbox was supposed to be the pot of gold at the long, long rainbow of insufficient CSS layout techniques.  And the only disappointment I've experienced with flexbox is that browser vendors took so long to implement it.  I can't also claim to have pushed flexbox's limits, but...

Discussion

  1. Hi David,

    thanks for the trigger!
    We digged deeper and unveiled the origin: https://twitter.com/slicknet/status/1180862121371811840

    That was fun :-D

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!