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[Via Bruce
D'Arcus](http://netapps.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/darcusb/archives/2007/10/01/adobe-buzzword-sigh),
amongst others ([such as Tim
O'Reilly](http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/09/adobe_acquires_buzzword.html))
comes news that Adobe has acquired an online word processor called
Buzzword. Bruce notes that it has no styles support, but that it will.
He's impressed with its beauty.
[Update – should have read Tim
O'Reilly's post more carefully – the
baby is actually a species of cute error message, but I think my
comments below are still valid in general]
I'm not impressed with this screenshot:
![graphics1](/blog/2007/10/03/10-01-45.649977/1.jpg)
The text around the image is unreadable. You try it.
> To place a graphic into this document open the Image Bar \ the next line\> and then click on the you can select \<oops class="spCh spChx2013">– need to go back to the left column\>
> click on the Insert Image Icon. Or \ line\> you can select Insert.
This is a really bad example to have picked – the procedure should have been broken
into step by step bullets without a sleeping infant.
People are excited about the ability to drag pictures around, but in my
experience that's one of the worst things about offline word processors.
You drag a picture and then as the text changes it jumps around,
sometimes onto the wrong page. For most users most of the time the
results are worse than just having images treated as characters. I
watched my nine year old try to lay out frog pictures for a school
project using Word the other day and it was horrific. Maybe Adobe will
do a better job.
What I'd like to see in an online word processor:
1. Good quality HTML, preferably XHTML either natively or via
import/export.
2. Atompub support both as a client and a server.
3. Interop with offline word processors.
My idea for this, which I shared with the Google Docs team is to use
an [ICE](http://ice.usq.edu.au/)-like stylesheet. If you create an
online doc then download it, it would [use
styles,](http://del.icio.us/ptsefton/usestyles) and provide a
toolbar that looks just like the online version with a built-in
upload button to send documents back to the online service.
An online word processor that did this would **infect the offline
word processing world with a benign styles virus**. If the toolbar
was good enough people would use it for all their documents written
offline, with a natural path to the online world.
(If nobody picks up on this idea we'll do it at USQ by working with
the most open online systems we can find as part of our commitment
to word processor interoperability. We have already started building
such a toolbar, and it will soon be able to talk to ICE services via
the web to make blog posts, update websites, post courseware to
Moodle and put stuff into institutional repositories. Online word
processor people, [drop me a line](mailto:pt@ptsefton.com) or call
me on +61 410 326955)
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