(2004-07-21) Bray Online Authoring Tools

Tim Bray [on](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/07/20/Authoring Pain) the need for "better" online authoring tools. If everyone's going to write for the Web (and it looks a lot of people are going to) we need the Web equivalents of Word Perfect and Word Star and Xy Write and MsWord, and we need them right now. Hmm, given that only 1 of those exists by now, maybe we need to think about that process... some thoughts:

• there are lots of very different writing Context-s, maybe lots of writing won't even be recognized as such, so "everyone" may not need what Tim's talking about.

• it would be interesting to plot adoption curves of blogging and word processing against each other

• the HTML widget in MsIE isn't horrible, and probably the same can be said of the editors available for Mozilla (though I haven't used those)

• if you're a BigCo drone, MsWord (and OpenOffice) will let you save a standard word processing document as HTML, even if it's tag soup inside

• there's a lot to be said for SmartAscii.

• OutLining seems like a key idea. Esp when combined with SmartAscii for in-line styles.

• Off-Line/draft handling is important, and semi-coupled to the authoring tool.