Guess what we have been doing for the last week? Implementing a WYSIWYG editor for our product (now it works btw).

Guess what I was using to write yesterday's rant about google and browsers? Yup, a browser.

Still I forgot my no. 1 request for any browser developer: a good writing environment.

Of course Dave didn't forget and in a comment he wrote:

So there's some obvious enhancements, steadily improving the text editing function of the browser. I've been writing about this for years and years.

I couldn't agree more. As a web developer and a web writer I keep stumbling in this major issue. Can you believe that in 2004, 20 years after Apple introduced to the rest of us the concept of WYSIWYG editing, the vast majority of weblog writers, literally millions of them, are still writing html tags if they want to make a font bold. This is sick.

Sure, there are hacks that can help. Right now I'm writing in a browser using a WYSIWYG editor, but let's face it: this kind of experience is miserable, it's only an hack. It's by no way similar to what you get using Word or any other serious desktop application, both featurewise and in terms of feeling and reliability.

Then, about Microsoft, Dave he says:

They've been protecting Office by not allowing MSIE to evolve into a two-way environment.

This reminded me of the early days of SOAP. As soon as we discovered that Microsoft was involved with the new standard I (along with many others) thought: cool, they are going to build SOAP into Windows and Office, soon we'll be able not only to write to our blogs using Word, but even to review our shopping baskets with Excel and have millions of other intergations between the most used productivity tools in the world and the web.

This didn't happen. Afaik Word is only aware of the web because it turns into a link every word that begins with "www" (I hate that feature!). It's time for some serious innovation, I hope that somebody at google (and everywhere else) is listening.