Is there other way to make a WYSIWYG editor on a webpage without using the designmode property?

Question

Is it true that most WYSIWYG editors on a webpage is by using the designmode property? Is there any other method besides using this method?

(is designmode first available on IE and other browsers added it too later on?)

Answer 1

HTML5 defines a contentEditable attribute that can be applied to any element (including the body element), it's supported in IE (which i think invented the attribute), Safari >2.0, and Firefox 3.x where x is at least 5.

Use is simply

<div contenteditable>Yay, i'm editable!!!</div>

Answer 2

Yes, this is probably the only way to do this without embedding non-html editors made in Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc.

Yes, this attribute first appeared in IE, then it was added in Mozilla (about the end of 2003), then in Opera 9 and Safari 2.