On Mon, 2 Jul 2001, Randolph Fritz wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 02, 2001 at 11:49:27AM -0700, Timothy Bolz wrote:
> > My last post got me thinking why do you need a word processor program. It
> > could be a web based program. Normally letters are one text. So why not
> > type it in the text. Then let it know what format you would like it in and
> > it could send it to whomever you like as an attachment. It would have to
> > have a conversion program to do this. XML,doc,rtf,Latex or whatever. Is it
> > to far fetched to do this?
>
> Provided one can cope with not seeing the document before it's finally
> formatted, this can easily be done with the old Unix text processing
> tools--*roff or LaTex or what have you--I suppose Scribe is still
> available somewhere.
>
> Thing is, the majority of users really need to be able to see the
> document while they're working on it.
There's also network latency issues to deal with I know i hate it when i
have to wait three seconds to see the last 50 char i typed.
There are a LOT of task specific Java editors for various formats, where
you go to a site and it downloads an applet so you can edit a config file
in a given XML format, and i've seen activeX versions of the same basic
idea. What you could do is have the <textarea> tag call a particular
editing widget which sucks you right down into the cross-platform issues
you were trying to avoid by doing it over the network :-D
to quote some random stranger on the issue:
"the nice thing about standards
is that there are so many
to choose from."
