I'm not a web guy

No, I'm just not a web guy.

I've been tinkering with gmail for the last few days and I just can't edit anything but the most simple message there. It's a wonderfully full featured web application but I feel lost in some ways.

I have a hard problem with wiki's too. I don't want to edit in a scaled down version of HTML. I certainly don't want to edit inside a text area in a browser.

What I want is a full featured client that allows me jump back and forth between the markup applications I like, build something that looks appropriate, paste it in and have the server side twiddle as appropriate. When it comes right down to it, I like rich clients and in some ways I'm having issues with the whole semantic web concept.

I like the idea from a data transformation perspective. Honestly, I put too much markup in the cruft I post here, much less in the data that goes into real documents. Presentation layer separation is essential for future doc portability.

That said, we're at the rudimentary stone age of tool development for real people, and perhaps for those like me who are tired of this silliness. I was there in the days when you had to examine control characters (in hex) in documents. And when things moved to a more sane, but really clumsy first pass markup mechanism (I wasn't there for Electric Pencil, but shortly thereafter). We finally arrived near WYSIWYG (whizziwig) in the mid eighties. I always called it 'What you see is nearly what you get' but it was darned close for a lot of documentation purposes.

It seems today (nearly twenty years after the whole concept of type, format and print became a commercial reality), that if you really wanted to be able to generate a large quantity of format agnostic text, you need to use something really crazy like DocBook. I feel like a criminal, but I'm not going back there damn it.

I'm quite willing (still) to segregate my writing and my markup. But my patience with doing markup inline is growing thin. Why can't I have an editor that deals well with rich text concepts and exports well to all the other important formats (PDF, HTML, Wiki, DocBook, RTF, who knows what might come). It should be simple, but it isn't, not by any stretch of the imagination.