I’ve recently been thinking about the future of the “authorship experience”: using pure browser-based editing environments to write scholarly/scientific papers. For highly mathematical work there may be some way to go before this is commonplace but this tool shows an interesting step in the evolution of browser-based editing environments:

http://www.aloha-editor.org/index.php

Of course, as the Aloha web site says “Aloha Editor is NOT a HTML Editor to install on a desktop nor it is a CMS” so you’ll need to provide some form of CMS/storage for Aloha (where to save the content you are editing) but it shows just how powerful in-browser editing has already become. I can only guess at the power of browser-based tools and editors that will surely evolve in the next couple of years, leading to interesting changes in content authorship, storage of articles being written collaboratively, submission to STM publishers and journal publishing. Exciting times ahead!