Tim Bray on 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 Ms Word, 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 Con Text-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 Ms IE isn't horrible, and probably the same can be said of the editors available for Moz Illa (though I haven't used those)
if you're a Big Co drone, Ms Word (and Open Office) 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 Smart Ascii.
Out Lining seems like a key idea. Esp when combined with Smart Ascii for in-line styles.
Off Line/draft handling is important, and semi-coupled to the authoring tool.