That one can get away from the default browser style, and edit in the same style as the site itself, is nothing short of a revelation to me—back in 2004, when I

That one can get away from the default browser style, and edit in the same style as the site itself, is nothing short of a revelation to me—back in 2004, when I encountered this pattern for the first time on the website of Mediamatic, a small Amsterdam based arts institution. Ever since I have been wondering why inline-editing is not seen more often. The separation between ‘front’ and ‘back-end’ seems unnecessary. ContentEditable came along to make things easier—yet it wasn’t really picked up. My hypothesis is that programmers are not really interested in innovating for WYSIWYG interfaces, our culture being steeped in reverence for Unix’ plain text. The age-old WYSIWYG editors like CKEditors are tolerated but not loved. On the other hand, I’ve seen lots of text-based editing solutions like Markdown-widgets and static-site generators. The tide does seem to be changing a bit, with such recent announcements as the Guardian’s Scribe project showing more interest in rich text editing. <plug> I wrote in more detail on this on my blog: http://i.liketightpants.net/and/hackers-culture-and-the-fear-of-wysiwyg http://i.liketightpants.net/and/hackers-culture-and-the-fear... </plug>