Word 2007 to Feature Built-in Blogging 228
Vitaly Friedman writes "Microsoft has revealed a surprising new feature for Word 2007: built-in blog publishing. The big surprise is this: the HTML that is generated is actually not that bad. 'Joe Friend, a lead program manager (Microsoft's term for a person who creates the specifications for software that programmers implement) has posted an entry on his blog regarding an interesting new feature being implemented for Word 2007: direct publishing of blogs to the web from within the program.'"
Re:Not bad (Score:3, Informative)
Re:May struggle to take off (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. [w3.org] And that's after he hand-tweaked some of the output.
Re:Spelling the cause? (Score:3, Informative)
It is available for IE and firefox.
Re:May struggle to take off (Score:3, Informative)
Quick! Phone Netscape and tell them how much trouble programs bundled with Windows have "competing" with the established players.
Regardless of that example, people will always prefer a package which provides a facility locally to one that operates over the web, even if the facility is web related. Everything works two or three orders of magnitude and more reliably when it's on your local processor using your local display.
Ultimately, that's why mainframes are still rare and Web 2.0 is hype. No one actually wants it. Which is better: maps.google.com or Google Earth? There's no contest, is there?
Webmail may appear to be contrary evidence, but in reality there is no good local competitor to webmails' killer feature: global access to your email. People who don't need that and can understand how to install a proper email client hate webmail.
Besides, when I think of Word, I think of letters & CVs & other formal stuff - certainly not blogging!
Funnily enough I have the opposite: I'd use Word (or Open Office) for quick one-sided notes or flyers with fancy text effects or other informal aspects, but for formal it has to be TeX every time.
TWW
Re:Spelling the cause? (Score:1, Informative)
Does anyone RTFA? (Score:3, Informative)
If you read the blog post it is fairly clear that this means that Word will send what you wrote to a blog through a blog API like Atom.
The means that the HTML that needs to be generated is fairly straightforward as it only needs to mark-up the text on a post and entire page - i.e. all it needs to do is paragraphs, lists, blockquote, headings, <em> and <strong>. It probably will be OK on the details given the the post.
Secondly it means it will not be doing FTP transfers.
Thirdly it means that this can only be used by someone who already has a blog with an API that allows posting with a blogging tool.
It is a perfectly logical step given the MS principle of making a few complex tools rather than lots of simple ones.
It is not a direct threat to Blogger, Moveable Type etc., as people will still need to host their blog somewhere. Of course MS might use the opportunity to point some people towards MSN Spaces - but the far stronger use of IE to point people towards MSN Search as not got them very far, has it?
Re:Spelling the cause? (Score:2, Informative)
Can't. The idiots at Netscape don't even using the system GUI toolkit, and instead wrote one from scratch. In fact, Firefox contains SO MUCH code that the OS could be using instead, it's ridiculous.
1. Custom GUI toolkit.
2. Custom image library.
3. Custom rendering library (as in, basic rendering commands like rectangles).
4. Custom COM library.
5. Custom scripting library.
6. Custom runtime library (as in, C runtime - no, not kidding, they redid the C runtime).
I'm sure I'm missing things. Essentially Firefox reuses absolutely none of the system libraries and substitutes in their own. This helps ensure that all versions of Firefox share the same vulnerabilities and that Firefox will always feel like a Windows app no matter what OS it runs on. (Since it's used on Windows most often, most of the GUI work is designed to make it mesh with Windows, forget all other OSes.)
Now I know this'll get marked down a troll for daring to question the Sacred Mozilla Project, but the amount of rewritten code in Mozilla is, honestly, ridiculous. I'll never understand why the OS community rallied around Mozilla and not the more-open Konqueror.