KompoZer Labs :: Web Processing

We believe that the future of WYSIWYG HTML editors is to be an easy, reliable, lightweight alternative to office productivity suites.

A better way to process office documents

Office suites don't work!

• office suites are incredibly bloated
• they require powerful computers, can't run decently on netbooks or mobile devices
• most users only need 10% of their features
• traditional office document formats are very difficult to implement — even for OpenDocument
• poor compatibility: MS Office / OpenOffice.org, or even between different versions of MSO / OOo
• poor productivity: most users loose a lot of time with these tools
• not comfortable to read on a screen
• they’re designed to print papers, but nowadays we need informations on the screen

Web standards as an office document format

• why on earth should we need a specific application to view an office document?
• portable by design: HTML is the most universal document format
• backward compatibility: HTML degrades nicely
• extensible through micro-formats
• can embed formulas (MathML), graphics (SVG), media (audio/video)…
• scriptable: JavaScript is far better than VBA
• comfortable to read on any screen size
• easy to index, especially when using a semantic markup
• transformable: either with DOM+JS or with XSLT — exporting HTML to PDF is a snap
• printable: specific CSS stylesheet, XSL-FO transformations, etc.
• can’t be easier to share on the web!

Mission statement

• design KompoZer-based tools (see below) to make web-based documents
• use Web standards as the de facto standard format of all office documents
• push adoption of HTML by MS Office and OpenOffice.org, at least as an import/export format

We think a web archive, i.e. a zipped file containing a main “index.html” file and other related files (SVG, SMIL, MathML, images, media… and even other HTML files), is the best possible common format to all office productivity suites.

It’s more than time to build web-oriented office tools to replace the old paper-oriented ones. The KompoZer project is a good starting point for that.

Web Processor

From the paper to the web, from the Word Processor to the Web Processor — Easy Text Processing! ;-)

Slide Show Editor

Slidy and S5 are an efficient way to make HTML-based slide shows. They aren’t widely used yet by non-techies because there’s no easy editor to take off the relative complexity of the syntax.

Designing a KompoZer-based slide show editor would be a snap. All we need is:

• a thumbnail sidebar to have a view of the whole document and to define transitions between slides
• stripped-down toolbars to leave only the necessary formatting tools
• a specific toolbar to add the common animations / effects on the current slide (e.g. incremental display)

CSS transitions, CSS gradients, resizable SVG graphics, audio/video elements: the web standards offer all we need to make nice, HTML-based slide shows. Some JavaScript libraries like Script.aculo.us can be used to add fancy effects.

e-Book Editor

Among the different e-book formats, ePub should be the most interesting one for the KompoZer project: it’s an open standard, it’s easily convertible to other e-book formats, and the content part is pure XHTML.

Again, designing a KompoZer-based ePub editor would be a snap:

• the sidebar would display the table of contents, which is the base of the *.ncx file
• the format toolbars should be stripped down to remove unnecessary buttons
• we need a “book properties” dialog to define the metadata included in the *.opf file
• saving an *.epub file is as easy as zipping the *.xhtml files along with the *.ncx and *.opf ones

Bonus: ePub is very easy to read on a web browser — see bookworm for instance (BSD-licensed).

Documentation Editor

This can be seen as a superset of the e-book editor: the user interface would be very similar. The main difference is that we’ll need more elements and indexes:

• an SVG editor such as svg-edit
• an raster image editor such as PixIr or Aza’s 14-liner
• a MathML editor such as FireMath (and/or a LaTeX to MathML converter)
• additional indexes: table of illustrations, captions, definitions… all easily generated by parsing the DOM

A few CSS stylesheets with physical dimensions should help cover the basic needs of word processor users (e.g. writing a letter or a resumé) who want to print their work; but the goal of this documentation editor would rather be to produce reports than printing invoices.

World Domination Plan

Build a web processing suite

KompoZer should evolve to a web processing suite, i.e. four applications based on the same code base:

• a web editor, obviously (HTML, CSS, DOM Explorer, Site Manager…)
• a slide show editor
• an ePub editor
• a documentation editor

Like on SeaMonkey, a “Window” menu would allow to quickly open one of these applications; unlike SeaMonkey, these four applications are very similar: they’re just HTML editors and share 99% of the code — but the UI is adapted to each case. A preference should allow to choose which application is opened by default,as many users will only need one of these apps.

Obviously, we don’t cover all the features addressed by MS Office or OpenOffice.org with these three web processing tools; but they would be easy to develop for our small team, and we could bring a free, lightweight, cross-platform, standard-compliant tool to cover the needs of many users. That would be the entry point to push web archives as an office standard.

Spread the web archive format

Most MS Word users use this bloated application because they have to open *.doc documents, even if they just have to display them. Alternative office suites like OpenOffice.org will never have a perfect document compatibility, that’s why they’ll always be perceived like a poor Office clone.

OpenOffice.org tries to be an MS Office replacement; we’ll bring an alternative. We won’t have all the features that OOo and MSO have, but we’ll also have a lot of advantages:

• documents are visible in all web browsers, even mobile ones;
• documents are editable on very light devices (MID, tablets, netbooks);
• documents are much easier to publish, share, extend and hack.

To help spreading a web-based alternative format to DOC / OpenXML / OpenDocument, we’ll have to design MSO and OOo plugins to export data from the word processor or slide show editor. As all office suites can export to HTML, this should be a rather easy task — most of the difficulty will be to cleanup the horrible markup with a Tidy-like tool.

We can’t get rid of Microsoft formats but we can offer an alternative: web archives should be the lingua franca of web processors / slide show editors.

Open up

We don’t want KompoZer to be the only web processing tool: we just want to promote HTML and web formats as tomorrow’s standard for office documents.

It might be interesting to develop HTML-centric spreadsheets and database clients, but that’s out of the scope of the KompoZer project at the moment. That would rather be a job for the OpenOffice.org team.