HTML DOM designMode Property

In the past:

• I had to see how the text change looks in a webpage – make change, refresh page or run the application again
• I had to inspect, find the related DOM to make any text change to it and then write code to make the change to see it
• I downloaded HTML page and then made some change in its text to add/edit/remove some comments for clean print.
• Have some logic to provide an editable HTML page to users

Well, no more. Seems we have a new property (surely it was not there few years back but introduced recently): document.designMode

I tried in Firefox, from menu items, go to: Tools -> Web Developer -> Web Console. Write:

document.designMode = "on"

Post this, you can edit the webpage text right in your browser!

Sample real use case could be providing a portion of page editable to users. Add that in an iframe and then turn the designMode of that to ‘on’:

iframeNode.contentDocument.designMode = "on";

Quote:

A string indicating whether designMode is (or should be) set to on or off. Valid values are on and off

In Internet Explorer, it would be under Developer Tools, and so on for other browsers.

Nice to have something like it to convert browser into a basic HTML editor! Keep learning.

Reference

• Document.designMode

History

• 23^rd July, 2020: Initial version