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by akx 4376 days ago
> Putting an IDE inside the browser, having no other dependencies between viewing web-pages and making web-pages is an incredible first step.

I... um, it's a first step we took 17 years ago, didn't we? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer

2 comments

http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ is not as old (1996) but is also pretty cool. I wish they had more funding to explore that idea that the web should be editable (as long as you have the authorization to PUT).
The very first web browser had editing built in. That's why HTTP has the concept of verbs in the first place! Otherwise GET would probably be implicit. Forms and POST came later, but PUT and DELETE was part of the original idea behind the web.

I totally agree that browsers should allow editing. Even if you are not authorized to PUT the page back to the server, it would still be useful to be able to edit before you print or save the page locally.

I really have no idea why we were robbed of this capability! It was probably just laziness from the people who wrote mainstream browser and httpd implementations.

A first step on a sinking ship doesn't count.
Mozilla Composer was part of the Mozilla Suite (a predecessor of Firefox).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Composer

Yeah but Mozilla Composer was begat by Netscape Composer, which was part of the push into "enterprise" and being a "collaboration suite" that jwz lists as the #2 cause for sinking of the Netscape ship:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

Anyone who doesn't think the Netscape ship sank is probably too young to remember pre-Firefox (or too close to events to be objective); but the fact that the ship was salvaged from near the bottom of the ocean doesn't change the fact that it did sink.