Mozilla hopes to simplify Web editing

In an article on the O'Reilly Network, Brian King describes Mozilla's editing functionality and explains its target of being an accessible tool for content creation.

King details the improvements over Netscape's Composer app, including better table editing, web standards compliance and general UI improvements. He says that the Mozilla editor philosophy is: "It's still tolerant of nonvalid markup, yet tries to 'do the right thing' when possible".

Although Mozilla's editor is focused on creating simpler, content-heavy pages (ie. it's a tool for writing, not HTML engineering) it has some advantages which give it an exciting future. One of these is Unicode support, part of Mozilla's internationalization infrastructure. The editor currently has support for Latin and Korean characters.

The editor's other advantages include the scope for extensibility and customization. Functionality can be added to the editor through Javascript and XUL, and because Mozilla is open source this makes it all the easier for it to be improved to suit your needs. The editor can also be used as a component in your own applications, meaning you can take advantage of the work done by the Mozilla team and focus on building your application rather than an editor.

Finally, Mozilla's cross platform support (almost every desktop/workstation platform) means that work based on Mozilla has more chance of working in multiple environments.

In later articles in his series, King will focus on customizing the editor, embedding existing functionality into your own applications, and how to go about building on top of it.