HTML. An alternative to Word?

Aug 19, 2007 · 3 minute read

When I’m writing code, be it CSS, Javascript, Ruby, whatever, I don’t like big bulky IDE’s. Give me TextMate or Vim any day. Going all freelance I now have the occasional need to produce nice documents and being in charge means I get to decide what I use to produce them. I never really liked working in Microsoft Word so decided against it. But rather than sensibly going for an obviously alternative I decided to just use HTML, or rather more specifically, Textile.

As an old time textpattern I learned to love the simple text transformation language and it’s inclusion in the 37signals apps made me smile and more likely to use them. Why use it over HTML you may ask? For me I think about HTML like a browser, as a tree of nodes. I end up spending quite a bit of time writing content then going backwards and wrapping what I just wrote in markup. This is fine for your typical site, but for writing documents it’s hard to get into a flow. With textile I can flow in one direction.

So far I’m liking it alot. I can seperate content from presentation (Word styles are a myth), easily repurpose my content (text, html, pdf) and write documents in anything I like, including Word if I chose to.

It’s been a pretty good excuse to play with various bits of CSS3, including multi-columns, advanced layout, generated content and the various print offerings. Given I can control the rendering engine then produce a PDF to distribute I can use anything that the latest browser builds can deal with.

I’ve not got all the workflow steps automated yet, I’m using Firefox to print documents to PDF (via Preview) at the moment which works fine but is still a manual process I can get rid of using something like css2xslfo and fop. I’m also pretty sure the PDFs won’t be accessible, although the original markup certainly should be.

As I produce more complex documents I’ll likely miss things like automated table of contents generation, footnotes and page numbering but, then again, I can write that in Javascript (or on the server) if I so choose. I was impressed listening to HÃ¥kon Wium Lie at @media about the process they used to format his last book using CSS and PrinceXML. I’m half tempted to spend time rolling all this together into a web app. It would be pretty good fun really; APIs, XSLT, CSS, PDF, some nice UI problems, etc. Only problem I see would be entering a market contested by Microsoft, Google, Sun and er, lots of others.