My web application is similar to StackOverflow in that different users frequently edit the same blob of text.
Currently we only support plain text, and therefore it’s easy to show users how the text has changed between edits.
I want to support rich text in these fields, but my users are non-technical and therefore markup of any kind is not an option.
Are there any javascript-based rich text editors that support diffs? Ideally the diffs would be in rich text as well, but if necessary they could be rendered in markdown or similar (I’d like to avoid raw HTML at all costs).
I don’t think anyone can authoritatively answer no to this question, but I’ve never heard of a Javascript WYSIWYG editor that does diffs.
Stack Overflow does diffs on the server side. You’ll probably have better luck if you look for a server-side component to do the job. If you need to show the diff as the user types, or something like that, you could use AJAX to hand off the diff work to the server.