On Mon, July 3, 2006 10:50 am, Greg Knaddison - GVS said:
That looks like the performancing firefox plugin. Something great when you have to post short stuff, once in a while, certainly not for "volume" production. As such, I'll surely use it when ready. Thanks for signalling it.
Well, you were bemoaning the lack of a "real, full, screen word processors and HTML editors, with spell checking, macros and lots of other goodies." That client (and performancing and...) gives most of what you were complaining about.
I disagree here. I don't think the intended *number* of authors matters at all. What I see is that Drupal, Wordpress, and basically every blog/cms I know of is implicitly designed for author(s) who publish (very) short texts, only once in a while.
Ok, I'll re-assert my point. Imagine your requirements in a multi publisher environment. Multiple people editing multiple text files on their client side and running scripts that directly import them into the system. That's what you want, right? Well, how do you control versioning? How do you control the individual preferences of each user to write their text files one way or another using one editor or another? How do you sync a local copy back with the server copy (since there are multiple editors...)? I'm not sure I've ever heard/seen anyone do what you're talking about.
You don't have to spend much time looking around before you see that people use all kinds of CMS for a wide variety of tasks including very long and highly formatted documents that get revised on a regular basis (have you seen the drupal handbooks, for instance?). And they do all that right within the browser.
Another fact to consider is that most WYSIWYG word processors (Word, OOo Writer, KWord, etc.) generally produce output that is tailored for a printer. Their web-targeted output is by and large attrocious and breaks very very easily. (Even the open source word processors are bad here, although not as bad as Word.) "Web pages" that you compose in Word are a poor web page anyway unless you do a dramatic amount of cleanup, by which point it's frequently easier to just copy and paste the text out of it. If you're doing something fancier with tables or lots of graphics, then use a web-tailored editor such as DreamWeaver or an in-page WYSIWYG editor (FCKEditor, HTMLArea, etc.), or even just learning HTML. You'll get much better results.
Word processors are all around lousy at producing web-targeted content, regardless of who's using it or how many people are using it or how much content you're talking about. They do a lot of great things, but web pages are not among them.
--Larry Garfield