Gadgetopia

mozile: index: I installed this, and at first glance, it looks as cool as it sounds.

“Mozile or Mozilla Inline Editor is an in-browser, context-sensitive, XHTML editor that allows a user to edit all or just specific editable sections of any XHTML page from the comfort of his own browser. It can act as the client-side of a content-editing system or as a self-contained ‘web word processor’”

Yes, you’ve seen WYSIWYG editors before, but this one is utterly transparent. You don’t have a text box — you literally edit the page as it sits in the window. It’s strange at first. You get a formatting toolbar built into the browser, even.

You set editable areas using CSS. Encompass something with a DIV, and give it a rule of “moz-user-modify” with a value of “read-write.” I’m still not 100% sure how to save changes or deploy a page, but it seems awfully impressive nonetheless.

When Macromedia Contribute was first announced, they made a very big deal about the fact that you could browse to a page, then click “Edit.”

“‘We’ve learned a lot about designing a product for people who don’t naturally love to use software…It was important that people not have to learn a new interface. This needs to be something that doesn’t require a big training or implementation process.’”

Mozile just blew a big hole in that competitive advantage.

O’Reilly has an article on it.