I just added a page to XML Information about some resources, including XML Please. I visited XML Please and read a new article there about using Google Docs (Writely) to draft XHTML and then use XSL to clean and re-publish the result at a separate website.

Its a wonderful idea! I tried it and am thinking of other cool ways to rework this idea. Lately I’ve been experimenting with ways to inject blog posts into movabletype, and this is a great source - I just typed up a test at Google Docs, cleaned the output manually, and now I’m going to try and paste it in here:

Doesn’t look to bad at all! I just tried a few more ideas - but they didn’t work as far as I could tell. I tried adding an image, which worked on the Google page, but it links to a relative, nondescript Google URL, which won’t translate to another host very easily. Even if you select an image from another URL, the same thing occurs. Too bad.

Frankly, I really like the MTOS rich text editor. It is so far better than the others available in my humble opinion. However, there are a few things I would love to change, like:

1. Make it wider. Can we put the options on the left below the edit window?
2. Get rid of the notification bar above the editor. It takes up way too much room in a very important part of the page.
3. Make selecting categories more like adding tags - use type ahead selection.
4. Retain line feeds in the raw editor along with <br /> tags. That would be awesome.
5. Add button support for headers: h1, h2, h3, etc.

Better Google Chrome support would be nice too, but I’m OK with Firefox / Iceweasel for now.