Battleangel | Personal

I have been in contact with the development team at Microsoft and I am confident now that the most obvious pitfalls in the application will be made null and void shortly. Most notably, the escaping / encoding for non-ASCII characters in XHTML mode will be changed so that it only escapes special chars like ampersand etc. As it stands, Swedish and other extended char set are replaced with entities which may not only ruin SEO, searching within a blog and make the XHTML quite verbose but also screw up plugins that read and process the text. Plugins like Transliterado which aims to solve the slug problem with certain non-ASCII chars.

Other suggested improvements that I and many others have requested include

• Image cropping and more attributes (title, class, id) for the IMG element.
• Real plain text pasting with no formatting hyperlinks, images etc preserved.
• Spell checking for more languages preferably using libraries that are widely available. Plus a thesaurus and a per account language option.
• General performance improvements in spell checker, load times and program redraws.

We’ll see how it goes. Microsoft has a real diamond in the rough with this software. Even in its current state I use it as my default desktop client. I have kind of given up hope that Microsoft will finish the somewhat half-hearted attempt at making Word 2007 a serious blogging platform, and my old software of choice w.bloggar seems rather quaint by comparison even if it of course enables flawless manual control over content.