Tim Berners-Lee mentions in his book, Weaving the Web, that he had originally intended the Web-pages to be fully editable in one application. You load up a page and edit the document within the browser. Amaya does this by default. Internet Explorer has had a couple of proprietary extension for this since 4.0 (designMode and contentEditable). Mozilla introduced its version of “designMode” in 1.3.

The result is a series of new tools designed to do what Tim BL originally intended, and indicates the advantage of open source. If people wants some functionality, they create it, and release it for others to enjoy.

Here are some of the recent in-browser tools released:

• Kevin Roth’s Cross-Browser Rich Text Editor
• Pixy’s CSS Editor
• The Mozile extension provides XHTML editing in the browser

Wonder what this medium was like if pages were always as malleable as Mozile, Amaya, and contentEditable make them…

Unbeknownst to me, Nick Finck was thinking the same thing (regarding the in-browser editor) and posted about it shortly before I did over at Digital Web. ’Tis a small world.

Also removed the contentEditable experiment made links unclickable in Mozilla.