The mainstream tool will be some kind of style editor. Maybe it'll incorporate a spellcheck and some other monolithic features. There'll be a pipeline underneat

The mainstream tool will be some kind of style editor. Maybe it'll incorporate a spellcheck and some other monolithic features. There'll be a pipeline underneath - to send things to paper or web or archive or accounts. LyX is already (mostly) there: http://lyx.org http://lyx.org While it's mostly LaTeX based, I could easily see it using any number of backends (another feature of pipelining underneath), such as markdown, roff, etc.