You can probably already think of a bunch of different ways to collaborate with your web-working co-workers on editing a piece of text: emailing drafts, wikis, instant messages, online word processors like Google Documents or Zoho Writer. DoingText is a new entrant in this crowded field, hoping to gain some interest by making the process as low-friction as possible.
The idea behind DoingText is simple: you launch a new discussion by pasting a chunk of text to their site. From there, you get a dedicated editing window that lets you make changes. The editing window understands the Textile markup language, so adding things like bold and italic and hyperlinks is simple.
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The key to using Google Docs (GDocs) document editing effectively is to understand that it’s a web word processor rather than an outright replacement for full-featured desktop word processors like Microsoft Word. GDocs includes features that make it easy to produce content for the web — it understands HTML (though not as well as it should), makes it easy to put in links inside and across documents, allows you to publish online, and encourages collaboration with features like version control and real-time multi-person editing.
If you go to the Google Docs home page, you can create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and folders to organize it all. This article focuses only on the word processing aspects of Google Docs — and looks at features that make it easier for you to get in a web word processing state of mind.
Edit the HTML directly. From the “Edit” page of your document, click on the “Edit HTML” link to the right of the “Revisions” tab. You’ll view the raw HTML of the document — and I mean raw. It’s not at all easy to read, lacking as it is in whitespace. If you want to do anything more than minor tweaks, you might want to take it to your favorite HTML editor to do so.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
