Don Park reckons that weblogs and websites will converge within the next 2 years time:
“People [will] take it for granted that webpages can be edited using their browser. People will also take it for granted that any webpages can be subscribed to with a single-click. Web browsers will be changed to support all this and more like highlighting of changes.”
Don is basically talking about browser/editors, which Tim Berners-Lee has always promoted and which is one of my pet topics. The W3C has one of the few WYSIWYG browser/editors around, called Amaya. But in order to write and edit content using Amaya, you need to publish with the HTTP PUT method which most web hosts won’t support.
I’d love to see a mainstream web browser/editor on the Web. But as I talked about in yesterday’s post, it looks like “Smart Clients” are about to usurp the browser in terms of providing interactive functionality. Smart Clients may be where all the writing/editing action is in 2 years time.
Jon Udell is exploring ways to write semantic content for the Web, which in the short term means XHTML. Microsoft is leaning towards Office tools for that type of writing – e.g. InfoPath and the next version of Word. I’d be surprised if Microsoft changed tack and moved XML writing functionality into the browser (which will be embedded in the OS in future).
So Don, I share your enthusiasm for a true web browser/editor. But I don’t think it’s even a glint in the milkman’s eye for Microsoft.
