A Plea for Better iOS Text Facilities
What we really need is a facility that provides access to at least some subset of WebKit HTML rendering capabilities at a level between CoreText and UIWebView—something that doesn’t require developers to essentially re-invent HTML and CSS but allows them to render at least some level of HTML formatted text to a native view or layer without the overhead and inflexibility of UIWebView—basically, a next generation version of Mac OS X Cocoa’s NSAttributedString. I’m sure providing such a facility in the limited environment of the iOS presents significant engineering challenges, but Android has such an API, and I think the absence of such an API on iOS is holding the platform back as a media platform more than almost anything else I can think of.
I used to think that rich text editing of some sort on iOS was just around the corner. I’ve even had folks at Apple tell me ”just wait,” as if it was almost here. That was years ago. At this point, I almost think it’s on purpose that we don’t have any sort of rich text editing. I just can’t figure out why.
It’s strange since NSTextView has been such a massive success on Mac OS X.
