Empty placeholders text blocks should not render themselves as break

[tiberiuichim]

Ticket title meant to attract attention, but I'm here for "Volto's 'new block' placeholder story"

I see that the empty block placeholder has started to render itself as a <br/>, which is fine in a way. The editor wants a new empty space, just like it wants it in a real word processor.

But making the empty blocks significant means that an editor might delete one now, because he doesn't want it, and then get stuck because there's no obvious way to create a new block after another one without a text input.

In my view the empty placeholder block should not be created when inserting non-text blocks. Instead, a plus icon should be shown (centered) below the current block, alowing the editor to insert a new block as desired.

If we continue to make empty paragraph blocks significant then we need to "own" this by not inserting them randomly.

[nileshgulia1]

But making the empty blocks significant means that an editor might delete one now, because he doesn't want it, and then get stuck because there's no obvious way to create a new block after another one without a text input.

In my sense, if we press enter( on a non-text block )and add another block we get a text block which is default and then we can add/replace another blocks with it. By using your opinion we can save user a click when adding non-text block. But again we have to re-think when we decided to make text block as default as a placeholder to render when there's nothing.

[tiberiuichim]

I think the bigger issue is that now that we've started to use Volto for real applications we go beyond the territory of what's inside Volto by default and we hit borders that we didn't know exist. One of these borders is the lack of comprehensive guidelines on Volto UX. At this moment we're just winging it: we, as developers, can get to an agreement on code issues, but not having an agreement on UX just leads to frustration and non-productivity.

I don't know if Volto was inspired by Wordpress' Gutenberg and it seems that the scope of that editor is a lot bigger (it wants to be usable on mobiles, which is not a specific goal for Volto, I think), but I'll be using their guidelines as far as possible: https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/designers/block-design/

[tisto]

@tiberiuichim Gutenberg and Medium.com were certainly our role models. We want something as simple as Medium with some features from Gutenberg (but not as many as Gutenberg to ensure better usability).

I haven't made up my mind about the placeholder text blocks TBH. Though, I think a new text block should be created when the user clicks in the area below the last block. This is how medium does it and with this maybe we would be able to remove the default block.

In any case. Those are things that you have to prototype and try out. Hard to judge without an example.