10 Mar 2010

HTML As Native File Format For Word Processing

I think it’s time for web technologies to march into another territory: word processing. Yes, you can export web pages from most packages, but I’m talking about using HTML, CSS, SVG, etc. together as the native file format (optionally packaged in a Zip container I suppose).

As Mark Pilgrim says, HTML is the format of our age, it’s looking likely to dominate electronic books, and more and more content is authored primarily for the web. We could ditch unsuitable tools (I’m looking at you, Word), improve future-proofing, and completely sidestep the ongoing wrangling between complex formats such as Office Open XML and OpenDocument.

Is there a package already out there that focuses on dealing with clean, valid HTML and styling applied via CSS? There are somewhat limited web-based editors, and WYSIWYG web dev packages, but I haven’t yet spotted a lightweight, easy-to-use word processor based fully around web technologies.