An Excellent Editor for Blogging
Posted on October 14th, 2005
I came across Dave Winer's site The Two-Way-Web the yesterday and found a very nice articulation of some of the ideas I've been thinking about recently with regard to the "best" interface for putting your writing onto a website. Dave writes:Microsoft's Web browser, which dominates the market, is not an excellent text editor. It's missing many features like Find and Replace that writers have come to depend on. And it's buggy: text selection in the browser doesn't work with the mouse, a device that became universal on PCs over a decade ago!
It's pretty clear that Microsoft doesn't really want us writing in the Web browser, which is not surprising since they also make the most popular writing tool, Microsoft Word. So we must route around this if we want the Web to be an excellent place for writers to communicate.Even though many people use Word, quite a few prefer Emacs or BBEdit. I like writing in an outliner. We can create a network of compatible content systems and text editors, figure out how it must work (bootstrapping), and even if Microsoft won't bring Word into the fold, there's probably enough openness in the newest versions of Word to make it part of the network without direct investment by Microsoft.
This is very similar to the way I had been looking at things, with one exception. I think it could be more convenient if the person doing the writing never had to bother with the mechanisms involved with transmitting their content. If you could only post your blog entries via Word or some other word processor via a plugin or some other specially-added-on tool, you'd have an unnecessary technology requirement. Having the equivalent of a "Blog This" toolbar button in Word would only become useful once you'd gotten yourself "set up."
But why should setting up consist of anything more than launching the application where you'll do your writing? I'd rather see the computer take care of the details of getting content out of Word, or AppleWorks, or Emacs, and leave me with the task of moving the document I'm writing from my local desktop to the server that will publish it. Maybe that happens via email. Maybe via WebDav. It's a document-centric way of looking at things. To borrow from a well-known usability book, it's bad enough I have get all the words in proper order-- don't make me think about whether the application I happen to be in front of is "smart" enough to push those words onto the network.