Writely can indent and print ... but nothing's perfect

Someone suggested that using the Tab key in Writely would indent the paragraph -- and possibly also work in HTML.

Now I'd prefer a true indent that Microsoft Word recognizes as such and would be able to modify in Word format, but even looking like a paragraph indent would be preferable to the typical Web situation in which all paragraphs begin flush left and the only way to tell one paragraph from another is to double-space in between.

Hey, that tabbing worked. Not as good as an automatic indent when you hit the Enter key, but I'll take it. (In case you didn't notice, the tabbing didn't hold up as HTML in this blog post.)

And how's the printing? I'll try it now.

Well, it prints great ... except for the "Page 1 of 1" at the top and the URL at the bottom. I guess for REAL printing, you'd have to Save As Word or Open Office and print from there. Not having to do that -- another feature that Writely needs, along with margin control, to be ready for prime time. Meanwhile, I'll publish this to the Blog.

For those reading this -- and not This Old Mac or This Old PC -- you may be wondering why I'm blogging on this very computer-centric topic at 2,000 Days in the Valley. If you need a reason, let that reason be that, at its core, it's about blogging and blogging tools, so maybe it's OK at 2,000 Days. And it's equally PC- and Mac-related, and not so teched-out that the average person couldn't potentially benefit from.

One thing about Writely, what it does, it does pretty seamlessly and quickly. There's almost no waiting for the page to refresh because little pieces refresh on their own. I think it uses the browser's ability to write HTML on the fly to do this -- a programming triumph that really makes the user experience better. And the reason why it won't work with Safari, I believe.