Aim Higher

Someone came up with a cool idea to add a universal edit button to make editing wikis easier. It adds a button like for RSS feeds that redirects the browser to the edit page. It’s clever but it aims way too low. If you can get browsers to add an editing button you have an opportunity to either point to an online form or a standalone application that could also edit the page. In other words, Atom Publishing Protocol auto-detection.

It would be a great shame if such a spec were limited to just redirecting to a HTML page or if it were thought of as a useful feature for wikis instead of a useful feature for the internet everywhere. Let’s face it, nearly every page on the internet can be edited by someone and I’m sure they’d appreciate it being easier to get there. Just look at the number of content management systems that provide some form of inline editing (heck RedDot renamed their company after the red dots that you clicked on inline to edit a section).