Symphonious

Jeff Atwood chimes in on the age old question of HTML vs Markdown/Textile/Custom Markup/etc. Unfortunately he rules out using a WYSIWYG editor with the one line statement:

Nothing's decided at this point, but we definitely won't be giving users one of those friendly-but-irritating HTML GUI browser layout controls.

Well sure, you wouldn’t give them a friendly-but-irritating HTML GUI browser control, but why not give them a good one? These days it takes a fair bit of effort to find a HTML editor that doesn’t handle the very basics fairly well and Jeff doesn’t seem to be looking at anything more complex than bold, italic and some hyperlinks. I think a lot of people get stuck in a real geek ego thing or remember the really early days of HTML editors and don’t actually evaluate modern editors properly and it’s a real shame.

All these simplified markup languages just don’t make sense to me, why make people learn something new just for some really basic formatting? Is it really that important to have the formatting capability at all?

My view is that you either need good, full featured formatting that a high quality HTML editor would provide, or you really want plain text. Hyperlinks can be added automatically to URLs easily enough which is the main thing you need and if focussing on the content is really what matters you don’t need any formatting markup at all.

Of course, I’ve seen things this way for ages (1, 2).

CMSWire: Vendor Criticism of CMS Watch

In an industry whereby most of the "independent analysts" are heavily dependent on revenues from the very firms they claim to be "independent" of, it's unusual to see truly critical research get published. So it becomes a surprise to both buyers and sellers when they read such criticism. In our reports we widely distribute the compliments and brickbats — if something is truly terrible we will tell you.

The way I see it, criticism is one of the most important things a product company can receive - particularly in an aggregated, general form like an analyst report tends to give you. It lets you identify areas you need to improve in that are actually affecting clients rather than the ones that seem important to you.

The first thing I do when I get a new vendor report is to search through it for any mentions of Ephox (it’s amazing how often we turn up in reports about web content management systems) and see what they didn’t like so we can work out how to fix it. Then I go through and find the general trends in the report etc to establish a wider industry direction and market opportunities etc.

I’ve said this internally to Ephox already but I want to give a big congratulations to the team on getting EditLive! 6.4 out the door. We have a lot of customers who have been waiting quite a long time for the features in that release and only a year or two ago they were thought to be effectively impossible given the Swing Text APIs that EditLive! is built on. It’s a testament to the team that this can be done at all, let alone with such high quality.

Of course, now it’s onward and upward so it’s back to the grindstone for all of you!

Since Ephox is an IBM business partner and we pulled the right strings and made friends with the right people, I get access to IBM’s offices (apparently world wide but Bedfont Lakes is closest and best set up). They’ve got quite a nice business partner suite on the first floor looking up at all the real IBM employee’s offices but before today it’s always been a major pain.

Firstly, without a car it takes about 2 hours to get here which is never fun, but today I have a car so that was ok.

Then you need to have your IBM badge to get in the front door which on previous occasions I’ve either not had yet, forgotten or in one case walked in the front door and lost, gone back out cancelled it and got a temporary replacement, walked back in a found my last card on the floor. Today I remembered my badge and at least so far it’s managed to not fall out of it’s little holder so it’s still with me.

Once you’re in the business partner suite you find that it’s very difficult to plug a MacBook power adapter into the power points here if you only have the short plug - you need to have the actual cord which until recently I only had an Australian version of.

Then you find that you need a login for the wireless internet which is easy enough to sort out but until today, somewhat inexplicably, HTTP POST didn’t work (GET worked perfectly, but not any HTTP operation that sent a request body), so I was left using my mobile internet. It seems that while I was back in Australia they’ve managed to fix that so I’m up and running again.

Even better, there’s now a beasty Dell server sitting in my utilities cupboard at home running the IWWCM VMs I need to work with and demo and I’ve actually got the firewall configured right so I can SSH in and set up tunnelling to access it from here.

Who knows, I might actually be settling in over here!

Ephox’s fearless leader, Andrew Roberts turned up in an interview with Randal Leeb-du Toit. Some good stuff in there, definitely worth a listen.