t’s one of my main interests to create a Web-based application with a WYSIWYG editor that allows working with parts of content, so called microcontent. Imagine integrating text or images from other Web sites into your new content object. This way, knowledge work can become visible online, e.g. showing in a SVG graph the content parts that a document integrated.

Jon Udell has published “Interactive Microcontent” with some thoughts and especially solutions on this aspect.

This is the promissing future of Web-based content editing of XML documents: Bitflux has released an alpha preview release of their next generation Bitfluxeditor.

Being one of the most innovative OSS projects in my eyes, the Bitfluxeditor is final gaining more and more attention. As Christian Stocker, the creator of the Bitfluxeditor, wrote, the Linux Magazine published a report on the XML WYSIWYG editor. Unfortunately, it’s not available online, which would be nice to gain even more awareness for this nice tool.

Lon announced that he will close the mailinglist for the Open Source version of Xopus, a WYSIWYG XML editor. Also, an initiative to start again development on OS Xopus did not seem to find any contributors. So it seems like OS Xopus is dead.

On the other hand, Bitfluxeditor Next Generation is well ahead and with the PHP documentation group in favour of using Bitfluxeditor NG, a growing developer community might emerge around this Open Source WYSIWYG XML editor.

Lon’s mail to the list (excerpt):

Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2003 10:06:10 +0200
Subject:RE: [xopus] Re: Xopus proposal

[snip]

I propose to close this mailing list down as it has lost it’s original
meaning and as long as there is no open source activity for the Xopus
project.
If there are no serious objections I will stop this mailing list.

[snip]

From the project Website [1]: “In all but the simplest cases, XHTML document editing means being able to change some areas of a page but not others. The overall look and perhaps the sidebars of a page are “fixed” but the meat of the page should be easy to change. 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”.”

[1] http://mozile.mozdev.org/

via bx-editor-dev mailinglist