[wordup] the future of publishing?

[Adam Shand]

I actually think this is really interesting and disagree with most of
the objections the author raises.  In fact I spoke to a friend in
Portland a month or two ago that had done a similar thing for a
publishing house he worked for.

* All reporters abandoned MS Word and starting using a simple windows 
  based HTML editor he found (can't remember the name of it).
* Reporters would save their documents in a network folder.
* Every X minutes a program would check for new files in that folder, 
  "de-moronize" their HTML, add the standards headers, footers, 
  stylesheets etc and save it to the correct place.
* By all accounts the writers all loved it as it made the whole process 
  much faster and cleaner.

Not quite the same thing, but I think it addresses many of the
objections which were raised.

Adam.

From: http://www.drop.org/node.php?id=772

Revisited: Blogs > future newspapers
Submitted by kika on Friday, January 25, 2002 - 13:36 

Somewhere in June I posted a story on drop.org called "Blogs > future
newspapers " that talked about a revolutionary concept of how newspapers
should publish on the web: the idea was to give every author or
newspaper writer a personal blog. Authors could then choose what to do
with the content they create - should it be published to the newspaper's
paper version or to the online web version, should it be posted on a
mailing list, kept in their public blogs, put in private archives, and
much more.

Yesterday I had the chance to see it all in action: Estonian's weekly
magazine, Eesti Ekspress, has made it happen. Well, sort of ... :)

Technical side

Their system is built around IBM/Lotus' Domino platform. On top of that
there are third-party extensions developed by IT Factory and a lot of
scipts/templates that are created in-house. All
creating/editing/publishing is completely browser-based.

Where are the blogs?

First off, no one uses the word "blog" over there. Instead, every author
has its own "homepage" where all his creations are grouped and listed.
For such an example homepage, click here.

They have workflow: for evey story you can specify whether it is:

      "draft" - only the author gets to see it.
      "ready" - the editor gets to see it as well.
      "edited" - the editor had made his changes.
      "corrected" - the spelling editor has made his changes.

And last but not least the story will appear on the designer's page
where the designer can export the text to a layout program before it
gets printed/published.

The good thing is that the story's original author doesn't have to wait
while his story is in the queue. Whenever he thinks his story is ready,
he can already publish it to his "home page", be it for peer review or
public discussion.

Text editor

I already predicted that the biggest problem were going to be the text
editor. Well, every author is forced to use a browser-based,
small-as-*hole ActiveX editor.

My concerns about the lack of usabilty were answered by the IT staff as
followed:

* Lag?
"Yes there is a noticable delay on the UI's feedback, but we are working
on this: we are going to upgrade the server to push the data through
bigger pipes."

* No local backup? You have to be online all the time?
"We have auto-save on editing. In addition to that there is a toolkit
called Domino Offline Services that allows you to replicate your work on
your home machine. Later it can sync your data back to server."

* No spell checking?
"Notes has automatic spell checking, Finnish is supported and we are
working on a Estonian version."
A pity that it is not going to be real-time: you have to save you
changes first before the text can go through the spell checker, and then
you have to switch back to text editor. Slooow ...

* The WYSIWYG editor's textarea is too small?
"We are working on code that allows you to change the size of the
textarea dynamically."
Still I don't believe in browser-based editing. It is OK for small
blog-like entries but what about long featured stories you work on for
weeks? Also, there is no easy way to write structured documents (or
outlines) in such editors.

So far most of the workers still use Word for writing their texts and
then copy-paste it to their "browser editor". Why should they adopt a
technology that gives them poorer working conditions and that distracts
their writing routine in every possible way?

MS or Linux?

One more interesting note: although most of the system is based on a MS
platform - Windows 9x/ME/2000 for the clients and Windows 2000 for the
servers, the IT staff is looking forward to use Linux. When the client
is entirely browser-based, there is no problem to run it from a
KDE/Gnome/whatever desktop. Add Open Office to the open legacy Word
documents and off we go. BUT ... what if only Netscape/Opera will
support WYSIWYG textareas?!