signor_john - 2:45 pm on Sep 6, 2009 (gmt 0)

What would be really cool is a piece of software that lets you work on a contents page (what we do) and outputs dynamic, static, mobil, etc pages on demand.

Trouble is, formatting is only half the battle. It's like having a word processor that can automatically reformat a novel's dialogue into dialogue balloons for comic books: Just because that's possible doesn't mean dialogue extracted from novels works well in comic books.

My own pages are successful (and profitable) with readers who like information packaged as conversational text in a linear editorial format, but they'd be lousy if ported over to a mobile Web site or iPhone app. On the other hand, I know another very talented guy in my field whose Web pages are delivered as "hypertext stacks" with a paragraph or two of text per page. His site could work better as a mobile app than it does on a conventional desktop or laptop PC. Software isn't going to turn my site into one that's optimized for mobile devices or his site into one that's optimized for people who read.

IMHO, tools may be important to the owner, but they don't matter to the end user. The person who's reading my Web site doesn't care if it was produced with Notepad, Homesite, Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Wordpress, Drupal, or Joomla. And people who go on about how real men write HTML in text editors is like saying "Real men program in machine language": It just makes the complainers sound really, really old. :-)