Writely is an online word processor currently in beta. It supports all the common formatting you’d expect from such a program, plus direct posting to blogs, so I’m trying it out. If you can read this, then I’ve succeeded in configuring it.
In general, I find I have little use for a word processor. In about 90% of all cases in which I need to write something, email or some other plain text outlet suits me just fine. Word processors were designed for producing print output, and there’s very little that I need to print these days.
I also have have issues with most web-based WYSIWYG editors, such as the one I’m currently using in Writely. For some reason, they generally insist on inserting errant spaces and doing funky things with line and paragraph breaks. I’ve tried incorporating some into the Movable Type interface, but the resulting code always seems to break my validation. We’ll see how you perform, Writely.
Upon inserting the hyperlink for the first word of this post, I became annoyed. I selected the word by double-clicking it, and the program un-helpfully selected the space after the word as well (grrrr). Then, upon applying the hyperlink, three spaces popped in afterwards that I then had to delete.
Upon checking the code, I am pleased that in-line formatting is applied via the span tag (though the style attributes are in ALL CAPS, for some reason), but I’m annoyed again now I see that two line breaks are used in place of a single paragraph break. Granted, it’s hard for software to determine when you’re going to hit Enter once or twice and then do the right thing, but it’s not impossible and ignoring the basic “p” tag has the potential to mess up my existing styles. Oh, and I just noticed that it inserted a superfluous line break at the start of the text.
There are some collaboration options that might be nice. I can invite other Writely users to see and/or edit this document. And that’s really the whole point, I guess. Writely is not just a word processor, but a document management and sharing system. I wonder how good it is at tracking changes? Oh, I see a “Revisions” tab that lists the changes made to this document as I’ve been working on it. That’s sort of cool. I’ll have to find some more people I know who use it and try out the sharing functions.
Many see tools like Writely as a potential Microsoft Word-killer. It’s been demonsrated that the vast majority of people use only a small fraction of Word’s capabilities, yet the software has become the de facto standard for word processing. Everyone seems to need it, but mostly for writing basic documents with minimal formatting. Given what I use word processing for, I have to say that, minus a few glitchy annoyances, Writely could meet my needs pretty well.
After posting this to the blog, I made a few corrections. The document title did not map to the blog post title, and the XHTML-compliant “<br />” tags I saw in the preview were replaced with non-compliant “<br$gt;>” tags with spaces in between them (I removed all of them and replaced with paragraph tags). The weird ALL CAPS formatting I spied on the inline span styles, however, were converted to lower case by Writely.
