Browser makers, where art thou?

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These days, we're dreaming about Daisy 3. We've just filed an innovation grant proposal together with a nice group of organizations where our research contribution will focus on the design of a scalable content repository, and are now exploring what we could/should do with regards to the user-facing parts of Daisy 3. While much of the focus of D3 will be around scalability (think 'exponent' rather than 'factor'), obviously we also want to provide a nice and user-friendly default content editing and publishing environment - like we do right now.

We've always been proud of our WYSIWYG HTML editor - in the sense that, even though it isn't the fanciest in its kind, it Works As Advertised (tm). Users are able to use both Firefox and Internet Explorer concurrently, while we try to ensure that consistent, well-formed almost-XHTML is saved in the repository.

Obviously, the base platform of in-browser HTML editing has its specific downsides, namely ... that editing support happens as an after- rather than a forethought (here follows a pun about outer-thoughts). Looking at the current state of browser-based WYSIWYG editing, we see some progress and surely sustained effort, but also must realize that the base run-time environment of such kludges, i.e. the browser, still doesn't natively supports the Writeable Web.

That means we have been developing Daisy for almost five years now, and now must realize that browsers haven't evolved quite as much in the direction we want: a stable and developer-friendly platform for building applications that help us realize the Writeable Web. We're not Google, obviously, which kind of came to the same conclusion and started Chrome as a consequence (hoping the corporate world will rapidly switch over to a new web client). Not that there is no progress at all, quite the contrary, but the speed of change is below one would expect.

Still, the alternate options are equally awkward. Java applets running in browsers? An exercise in self-inflicted pain. Flash? It doesn't ship with a serious web editing component neither. JavaFX? Silverlight? Let's see those gather some marketshare first.

Now people might react that the state of the art already allows a lot, and will point me to some sort of nifty Javascript or Flash library which looks Really Really Good and has a great demo page. However, what we're looking for is a lot more boring and mundane:

• serious copy/paste buffer support on all platforms, so that I can copy text from Word or OpenOffice and the formatting is preserved while mapped to XHTML constructs, on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X
• the ability to drag-n-drop images from my Windows Explorer or Mac Finder in my editor and a consistent way to upload those (possibly sets of!) images to a back-end
• worse, the ability to copy-paste images from Office or other desktop applications and convert those automatically to a decent web-friendly format (like PNG) *after* scaling them to the size I want (and still preserve the original paste buffer in case I change my mind)
• real-world, performant spell-checking and auto-correct
• supporting longer documents (beyond what Google Docs currently supports) while still spell-checking (an issue in my Firefox installation)
• a unified way to handle temporary local storage (for those people like me who hit command-S after every paragraph) like having Google Gears installed by default on all browsers on all platforms - because I'd like to have access to my data and applications on the road
• and all that while saving semantically-squeaky-clean XHTML, while still allowing specific extensions to encode non-Web constructs

Simply being able to open up browser content to the Writeable Web. Wouldn't that be nice?