a thousand furnished rooms

There are all kinds of HTML editors, of course. You can save HTML out of your Word documents and such. Moreover, XML authoring of content is increasing, and with it has come an increase in the number of XML editing tools.

Despite this growth in tools, authoring for the Web remains, by and large, a fairly difficult proposition. The tool I am currently using (MovableType) allows me to do rudimentary authoring (paragraphs and some formatting essentially) without resorting to hand coding. But the easiest way for me to accomplish slightly more complex formatting (lists, for example) is to dive back into HTML coding. Moreover, the editing window I use within the MovableType application does not have a couple of basic editorial tools I use pretty heavily--spell checking, a dictionary, and a thesaurus to start with. So I find myself writing in a word processor, then copying text over to the Movable Type window, reformatting it as necessary... really, there has to be an easier way than this, and I am not even talking about writing more lengthy documents or more complex text (with tables, math, and figures).

There are some emerging tools that are beginning to cover this gap. Ektron, for example, has its EWebEditPro and EWebEditPro+XML. These both provide an Active X control that provides a WYSIWIG editing interface where otherwise the user would face a plain text interface to XML and/or HTML. And Office 11 is adding additional support for XML.

The ultimate tool would combine a familiar word processing interface, including tools such as spell-checking and a dictionary, with an ability to automatically embed the appropriate HTML (and ideally XML) markup. Along with the content creation itself, users would be able to easily add, review, and update metadata related to the content. This would be a rudimentary set of functions for content creation, and should be the starting point for a solid tool.