Wordgard: ProseMirror creator ships a new schema-based rich-text editor

Marijn Haverbeke, the developer behind ProseMirror and CodeMirror, has released Wordgard, an open-source JavaScript library for building in-browser rich-text editors. Rather than acting as a free-form HTML editor, Wordgard is schema-driven: developers define exactly which document structures are permitted, giving them tight control over content. The project’s central selling point is its programming interface, positioned as a versatile foundation for building custom and demanding editors.

The library leans on a modular architecture where most features ship as replaceable extensions, and much of the codebase is written in a functional style aimed at clarity and testability. Out of the box it supports structured content such as tables, nested lists, and captioned figures, along with accessibility for screen-reader and keyboard users, UI internationalization, bidirectional and right-to-left text, and real-time collaborative editing with concurrent-edit merging.

Wordgard is MIT-licensed and developed on Haverbeke’s self-hosted code.haverbeke.berlin. Notably, the maintainer welcomes bug reports but does not accept pull requests, and asks commercial users to voluntarily help fund maintenance — a social expectation with no legal obligation. The governance model echoes Haverbeke’s earlier projects, trading community code contributions for tighter single-maintainer control.