One characteristic of the HTML that I use for the majority of my Web pages
is that it's very simple. Here on miscoranda, for example, in the
body of posts I only use p, a, em,
strong, code, pre, dl,
dt, dd, ul, li, and
blockquote. Since HTML's verbosity makes it unwieldy to edit by
hand, using a poor man's
hypertext language (PMH for short) is an attractive alternative. If you've
ever used a Wiki, or
Perl's POD
format, or atx, you'll know
what I'm talking about.
But with respect to browsing, HTML source and PMHes are generally unconsumable formats. To use links, it's best to load HTML in a browser. Formatting in a browser is also more user-friendly: I tend to prefer rendered HTML's "blargh" to PMH's "*blargh*" or "''blargh''", etc.
So there's a problem with modes. When editing HTML, I'm bound to use a text editor. I'm writing this post as raw HTML source in a text editor. But when consuming HTML, I do so in a browser. TimBL, in his Editing User Interface has expounded upon why having both edit and browse modes is harmful, but it's obvious really: it's an annoyance.
PMHes can actually be seen as a mini-solution to the mode problem. It's more friendly to read than HTML source, and it's easier to write, too. But it's not rendered HTML, and so it's not optimal.
For an optimal solution, people have tried two approaches: GUIs for editing HTML, e.g. Amaya, and Through The Web Editors, or TTWEs. GUIs for editing HTML don't solve the mode problem if they can't be used as a primary browsing method, so we can discard Amaya as a potential solution. This leaves TTWEs.
TTWEs are, often, JavaScript applications that one can use in one's favourite browser that make the pages editable. With a bit of hacking, it is possible to make all the pages on one's hard drive, and all the pages on the Web in user-editable space actually editable through the browser.
This is powerful, but it makes me slightly squeamish. The principle of Code Shui says that you shall make your source code readable. Leaving source code up to a TTWE means that the TTWE's formatter had better be pretty good, and most aren't.
So the conclusion to this mini-rant is that text editing is not going to go away for a while. Which means that it'd be nice if text editors supported PMH munging and saving via FTP, and HTTP POST/PUT...