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How Edit This Page works in Scripting2
By Dave Winer on Wednesday, June 23, 2010 at 12:53 PM.

A picture named touchdown.gifThis is more geeky tech stuff, and might interest about a dozen people, so if you don't understand -- no problem. It won't be on the final exam. <img src="> permalink

Edit This Page was the central feature in Manila, the blogging tool we shipped at UserLand in 1999. For me, a blogging tool without it isn't much of a blogging tool. But it's not easy to implement. C'est la vie. Neither was Undo, but the Mac required it, and it's one of the reasons people like the Mac. permalink

Windows, which came along later, copied the Mac.  permalink

The premise was that every story in the system would have an ETP button that, when clicked, would open the story in an editor, so you can make the change, hit Save, and get on with it. Content management systems of the day didn't have that feature.  permalink

Because of that, users had to understand two different content structures: 1. The one they used to read the text and 2. The one they used to find the source.  permalink

Programmers may not have a problem with this duality, but writers, non-technical people, had a lot of trouble with it. ETP removed the duality. When you see something that needs fixing you just click a button to make the change. permalink

Anyway -- Scripting2 will have that feature as well. I'm getting started implementing it, so if you look at the HTML source for this page, you'll see a <script> element that links back to the local server, 127.0.0.1. If you don't have a server running there, hopefully your browser just ignores it. That's one of the reasons I'm writing this post, to see if that assumption is true.  permalink

On my machine, the HTML the script returns is a form with an Edit button, that, when clicked, loads the source of the page into an editor where I can change it, save it and move on.  permalink

Update: 6:21PM Eastern -- it works! <img src="> permalink

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