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Word 2007 to Feature Built-in Blogging
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.'"
In the last several iterations of Office, I've seen nothing different in Word (besides some stuff being moved around). I'm not particularly interested in a program that will help me blog (or even myself blogging at all), but it's cool that they're actually thinking of things.
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The first time that someone accidently blogs sensitive company/military information without realising it is going to be hilarious.
The main effect of this will be that we see even more blogs that use Comic Sans. Oh boy, I can hardly wait!
Let's hope the fonts included in vista catch on - they're actually quite fetching, and designed by some of the greats of contemporary typography. (Props to Lucas de Groot!) Georgia is gorgeous too, and included with the current generation of windows.. Microsoft actually can do some stuff right; they're paying penance for comic sans..
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Most blogging systems have some kind of web service now that allows integration with many editors. On my own site I manage updates and deletes through emacs (on Windows, no less). I'm curious to see if Word will support Blogger, which is owned by Google.
Just filling out the web form for this comment fills like writing in cuneiform...
After playing with the Beta 1 Refresh, I think the gentlemen in Building 9 should have scrapped Vista's Glass in favor of the Office 2007 user interface. And other ISVs might seriously consider moving to the new Ribbon interface - in particular Adobe. Photoshop and similar products could certainly benefit from the new paradigm.
The words white, chocolate and raspberry have no place on a bag of coffee.
That's a very valid point. Among my friends is an extremely talented technical writer who spends her *entire working day* in Word. Recently, I coded a collaborative blog for me, her and another friend - a place for us to crack jokes, post stupid photos and generally riff off one-another's slanted sense of humor - took me about 3 hours and I used the FCKeditor for composing the blog entries.
You wouldn't believe her delight when she found herself able to "post something to the internet". She was all smiles for weeks, thanking me repeatedly for setting it up. She now has a huge sense of empowerment and doesn't have to know jack about any nerdly technologies / markup languages. She just goes to the post page, inserts her pictures, clicks the Post button and bam - she's "on the internet". Take my word for it when I say she is beside herself with joy.
So agreed... this feature will be well appreciated and well used by less technical people.
Microsoft wants to compete with Yahoo, MySpace, et. al. as a user-generated content portal. Everyone and his donkey uses Word. If you're already using Word, even though it will support Blogger and other blog sites, I would be surprised if it weren't just a bit easier to use with Windows Live Spaces.
I think of this as somewhat analogous to the iPod/iTunes connection. Everyone has an iPod (yes, yes, I know not *everyone* has an iPod, and that a certain percentage of people just love Ogg Vorbis, but think Middle America here), so iTunes is a natural choice for music downloads. Everyone has Word, so blogging on Windows Live Spaces with the handy new "Blog it now!" feature is a natural choice.
Will it work? I doubt it. There are just too many already available tools that make blogging easy. Plus, Microsoft's brand has been so damaged that I'm not sure even Ma and Pa Kettle are going to jump over to Windows Live Spaces in droves.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Sure, the quality of HTML produced by previous versions of Word has been awful. Most (all?) WYSIWYG HTML editors went through that phase, but Word certainly took a damn sight longer to grow out of it than most.
However, MS tools generating decent HTML isn't new. VS.NET and ASP.NET generate acceptable HTML, and it all works cross-browser too. (Some of the controls degrade gracefully in non-IE browsers, but the basic functionality is still there - treeview controls still work, just less dynamically, for example).
It's nice to see the Office group finally taking a leaf out of the dev tool group's book.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I promised myself awhile ago that I'd stop replying to posts like these, but it's just so misleading, I can't help it.
You obviously didn't look at the page source as suggested. The parts of the page generated by blogs.msdn.com may have had validation errors, but only one of the errors actually came from the part that Word generated (and he later hand-tweaked). FTFA: "...look at the HTML starting with 'Word is a great tool...'," and later, "Did I mention that this was beta software and we were running hot?... I had to make a few hand tweaks to my post due to bugs (I'm sure our developer would blame it on user error)." In other words, you validated the wrong thing, and this is still just a preview of the final feature. The fact that he described it as "running hot" indicates that it's less finished than most features in Beta 2.
ObDisclaimer: I work at MS and I'm a developer in Office (although not on Word), so I have asbestos undies. Go ahead and flame away.
BTW, I'll save you some clicks. Here's the error that appeared in the actual body of the post:
Error Line 218, column 2: document type does not allow element "P" here; missing one of "APPLET", "OBJECT", "MAP", "IFRAME", "BUTTON" start-tag .
<P><STRONG> </STRONG><STRONG>PS. A little honesty<BR></STRONG><FONT size=2>
The mentioned element is not allowed to appear in the context in which you've placed it; the other mentioned elements are the only ones that are both allowed there and can contain the element mentioned. This might mean that you need a containing element, or possibly that you've forgotten to close a previous element.
One possible cause for this message is that you have attempted to put a block-level element (such as "<p>" or "<table>") inside an inline element (such as "<a>", "<span>", or "<font>").