Joe Friend, a lead program manager (Microsoft's term for a person who creates the specifications for software that programmers implement) has posted an entry on his blog regarding an interesting new feature being implemented for Word 2007: direct publishing of blogs to the web from within the program.
Those of you who have used Word's HTML output at any time in the past know that the code it produces has always been terrible, embedding hundreds of unnecessary manual font changes, eschewing cascading style sheets, and generally producing HTML that makes a typical web developer want to vomit. Friend insists that those days are now gone forever:
"Stop, don't jump to the end of this post to push the comment button yet. I'm not an idiot. I'm not endorsing you commit HTML suicide. If you've ever written a post in Word 2003 or before and then copied and pasted the text into your web browser you know what I'm talking about. Sure you can do it, but you have to run one of those HTML clean up tools so that your posts don't look mangled. Even then the HTML is not tight and clean, right?
Well no more."
The blog post itself was generated in a beta version of Word 2007, and Friend encourages everyone to use the "View...Source" menu to see what he is talking about. The HTML still has the feel of a machine-generated algorithm, and comes up with very strange names for some of its class id's, but it makes full use of CSS and is remarkably clean and readable. This is not your grandfather's Word HTML.
Word 2007 will feature built-in support for existing blogging services, such as MSN Spaces, SharePoint 2007, Blogger, and Community Server, the latter of which is used for blogs.msdn.com. In addition, it will allow the user to automatically upload a new post to any site that supports FTP, and support for metaweblog API picture handling is in the works.
Why bother with all this effort to put blogging support into Word? Friend explains the reason for the feature:
"When I write a blog post using my blog providers web-based editor I miss some of the familiar Word features that I've come to rely on, specifically background spelling (those little red squiggles) and autocorrect. These features keep me from making stupid mistakes. Also, I simply want to use the tool that I use for most of my other writing tasks."
Interestingly, this explanation sounds eerily like an open-source developer talking about the need to "scratch an itch." However, Microsoft's need to convince people to move to Office 2007 and its completely redesigned user interface, combined with the current ludicrous popularity of blogs, undoubtedly convinced the company that such a feature was worth spending development and testing time on.
Will bloggers move away from existing content management solutions like Blogspot and Movable Type towards a Word 2007-based workflow? Probably not, as people typically are happy to stick with what they are used to as long as it works. However, it may well open up a flood of new blogs from people who spend most of their time in Word.
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