Abstract: Embodiments of the present invention relate to methods, systems, and computer-readable media for editing an object displayed by a computer system. Editing comprises detecting an edit operation for an object displayed on a video display of a computer system. An edit operation request is then sent to an abstraction layer via an application program interface provided by the abstraction layer to initiate editing of the object by the abstraction layer. The abstraction layer is a text object model that has two models, a data model for accessing persistent content of text, and a view model for accessing presentation and interaction appearance of text.