I'm building a js-based collaboration system, part of which breaks text into components to allow portions to be dynamically swapped out, rearranged, etc. Ultimately I want users to be able to highlight portions of the text, which segments the content into modular units. The purpose is to allow editing of the individual components and enable selection of the best versions of each. Has anyone come across any open source tools that address anything like this?
There are so many tools that can help achieve some of the functionality involved, but I'm really looking for something more comprehensive like a framework or engine designed specifically with the scope of these challenges in mind. I've built a flexible javascript object structure to allow concepts to be assigned and associated easily. I was using jQuery to grab the content strings and have been using a combination of jQuery and underscore along with various other tools and utilities I've put together to do the text/object manipulation, coupled with modified jQueryUI widgets for doing things like drag/drop, etc.
A couple of days prepping for this leg of the project has made it clear to me the enormous complexities involved and I don't want to waste time re-inventing the wheel. Browsing through the wide spectrum of tools out there was overwhelming and I feel like I could misuse a lot of time without leaning on some other people with more experience in this area. I know there have to be a number of projects that have already solved this kind of visual content/concept modification-categorization and addressed the intricacies to evolve some best-practices out of the process.
I've considered looking into some of the WebKit and Firefox internals that deal with text parsing but this seems a little off-base for what I'm aiming for, although the DocumentFragment interface may hold some promise. I started digging a little deeper into Dojo last night and I have to say I'm kind of astonished with how thorough a lot of their work is. After looking through a fraction of the massive amounts of work that's already been put into language semantics and other fundamental conceptual theory, I thought I should see if there was a project I could go to for inspiration, guidance, or even just utilize some of what has already been done. Any suggestions?
Thanks for any input!
