What's a good web technology to use to build a text editor?

[Alphathree33]

I'm interested in building something like the rich text editor that GMAIL uses.

Are they just using an IFRAME and catching keypress events and then modifying the innerHTML of the IFRAME? That seems like a really odd way to do it

 

[joinT]

there's lots of open source editors;
tinymce
htmlarea
fckeditor

maybe have a look into those?