Hi, co-creator of tiptap here and the one who wrote the heading:

We went with “renderless” for tiptap v1, but this is not really correct and a lot of people switched to “headless”.

Give me a better word that’s know to more people, I’d love to change it!

With web artisans I wanted to point out it’s for people who really care about every detail.

If you just want to slap in an editor and that’s it: tiptap is not for you. If you want to really customize every aspect of the editor: You should definitely consider using tiptap.

Edit: typo

> Give me a better word that’s know to more people, I’d love to change it!

Thank you for being flexible :-)

Headless literally means "gui-less" (without a gui) and has had the same meaning since 1998 or so so it's probably not a good idea to reuse the word to mean something else in the same context.

I would go with either "style-less" (which is a bit awkward to say") or "effortless", which is better even if not totally accurate.

With "effortless" you fully capture how easy it is to use.

> With web artisans I wanted to point out it’s for people who really care about every detail.

You can keep artisan - it looks correct in this context.

tiptap comes without a graphical user interface. It’s an API and you have to build the gui. Are you sure headless is so wrong?

Yes, I'm confident it's wrong because it re-use a word in a way that will confuse. It implies it'll be used without a GUI and the first thought is not to think "oh, they must mean it doesn't come with its own GUI". Lots of others things that have an API do not get called headless - presumably as they're aware of the existing use of headless and thus don't want to confuse people.

Maybe you could explain it's a backend for an editor.

Or maybe "unstyled"?

> tiptap comes without a graphical user interface. It’s an API and you have to build the gui. Are you sure headless is so wrong?

Unless I misunderstood the example, all you have to do is instantiate it to make it work with a default look.

If "using the API" is headless, then everything is headless because they all have an API, including things like Qt, WxWidgets, etc. This is obviously not the case.

3 out of 80 examples have styling applied for demo purposes.

The package comes without CSS and markup as explained on the frontpage.

> Headless > It’s headless and comes without any CSS. You are in full control over markup, styling and behaviour

Headless is definitely wrong.

I saw the title of this story and assumed that tiptap was going to be a component that somehow backed up various WYSIWIG editor-clients. That would be headless. (It's even useful -- the transaction system + collaboration server is theoretically a thing that could back up other clients, after all, though in practice it's going to force enough design decisions onto the clients that it's not really worth it.)

Tiptap does come with a graphical user interface, insofar as it looks like the most minimal possible use of it (from your "Minimal setup" example) will create a contenteditable surface to write in. Said surface is the "head".

I'd consider "flexible", "customizable", or "unopinionated". "Unstyled" was suggested, but although it's true I think it's misleading -- the need to construct your own toolbar goes beyond what that implies.

> It’s an API and you have to build the gui.

It has an API, but after a quick peek at the page, I wouldn't say it 'is' an API. I'd call it a library.

Do the entry points of a library no longer constitute its “API”? That is the very origin of the term.

effortless is great, I was going to say completely customizable but effortless is better.

Styleless is bad because to be without style is to be bad.

the effortless editor you can customize every aspect of.

effortless sounds good, but is it really true here? If I have to style the complete editor myself that sounds like a lot of effort. I would go in the direction of "The fully customizable editor" or something similar.

doesn't effortless mean exactly the opposite? drop in, fire and forget.

"non-opinionated WYSISWYG Text Editor" ?

tiptap is very powerful, but definiteley not for people looking for an effortless solution. Yes, that’s what I think too.

"Styleless"

Headless means a command line program without a GUI.

Back in my day, "headless" meant a computer without a monitor, for example a server or a PC that had been repurposed to server duty.

We also had the opposite: before Xrandr or Xinerama, there was an older X feature called "Zaphod Mode" that allowed you to drive a graphics card's multiple outputs (on cards that supported such) mapping each to a different X "screen", Zaphod Beeblebrox, of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, had two heads, you see.

"Headless" can also refer to a browser that doesn't render to the screen, useful for automated integration tests.

Yeah I think the Jamstack folks have decided to use headless in an entirely different way. For example search for headless CMS you'll find loads of CMSs that just run on a server and use an API to talk to the client, but they're just web pages.

It just means not WordPress I think in this context.

Then it’s styleless and markupless (that’s not a word, is it?), too.

Well I'm probably not really in the target audience, so take my confusion with a grain of salt if those are widely used terms among those who are. The list of features in your other comment does sound pretty appealing though. Maybe the site should have something like that as a column down the side or something - I would have immediately understood instead of coming here and complaining about headlines!

I'd call it "stylable", "freely stylable", "add your own CSS", "DIY CSS" or similar, as they seem like they mean what you're talking about even to people who haven't run into them before.

Artisanal to me suggests obviously handmade and deliberately unpolished (as a stylistic choice, not a negative). The immediate image that sprang to mind was pottery with finger marks in it, so I was a bit lost with "web artisan". The strengths of tiptap seem to be the flexibility and customisability, and realtime collaboration, so a word that got that sort of thing across would communicate more.

Style-agnostic is probably what I would go with.

Instead of "headless", which I agree is confusing, perhaps instead: bare-bones; unstyled; fully customisable; extensible; unopinionated (maybe).

"Artisan" seems fine, although it's slightly obscure. Perhaps instead: control-freak; obsessive; perfectionist. They are somewhat negative, but they're also points of pride for some.

So for example: tiptap, the fully customisable editor for website perfectionists.

Just some suggestions :)

I use headless editors every day, mainly ed and sed. This appears to have little relationship to that word.

It still can be a good product, but it would be more useful to have a description that reflected its use and benefit.

headless instantly made sense to me, I was thinking of it like contentful/headless shopify even if there is a little bit of a gui. I interpreted it as something I'd have maximum control over in just one word.

Makes sense to me too. Given all the attempts at alternatives that don't quite work, I'd fully support an evolution of what headless means and hope to see other libraries about it. The context makes it pretty obvious.

I wish people will stop using headless in all kind of contexts. It does not help understanding how the project works.

What is headless? Who come in this case CSS is a "head"? I would say HTML is the head.

In the context of UI components it has taken on the connotation that it mainly handles interactivity, state, performance, accessibility, cross-platform support and similar functional aspects, while leaving decisions about the visual design to you.

EDIT: And it does allow you to customize both styling and markup, as far as I understand.

I've read your post and the parent several times and I still can't understand what you mean by "it".

First “it” = the term “headless”

Second “it” = the UI component branding itself as “headless”

Third “it” = tiptap

> > The headless editor framework for web artisans. > This sounds like a parody.

Don't forget the classic:

> Made with ♥

What’s wrong with “Made with Love”?

It's a cliché and it's meaningless - it's not like you see "Made with hate" or "Made with indifference (but at least it covered my mortgage payments)".

Maybe it’s just not too often that people invest a few 1,000 unpaid hours in an open source project motivated by hate, I don’t know.

We’ll consider to find something more meaningful than love for the footer message.

"Made with passion", and "Made with dedication"

Both don't have Unicode emoticons.

Nothing wrong with:

"Made with ♡"

Awesome thing about advice and criticism - you can decide to ignore it.

Do "Made for the ♡ of (unicorn emoticon)" if it floats your boat.

This is a common signal for "I care about my [front-end] work."

Absolutely nothing's wrong with it, but it's just am addition to parent comment on how funny some phrases sound like.

Anyone can write whatever they want and name their projects however they want.

"Fastest standalone headless framework. Powered by AI. Written in TypeScript, coded with love in San Francisco Bay, by @kode_ninja using VSCode."

I write this with no offence. Just always have a chuckle while reading phrases like parent commenter and I commented on. :)

The term "headless" is widely known in the React world for components where I have full control over markup and styling. In the Vue world, this is usually called "renderless". We have then decided to use the term "headless".