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So here are some issues for the future.
One is, are you browsing or authoring? This is actually a tough usability problem. Netscape Navigator Gold has one solution - you have to be in completely different modes of the product for creating vs. browsing documents. We don’t do that. But there are some consequences, because we have some features that make a lot of sense for authoring but little sense for browsing. It’s a tough problem to figure out when someone opens an arbitrary document what they intend to do with it.
Another goal is that file format (HTML, DOC, etc.) and connection type (LAN, HTTP, etc.) should be completely irrelevant and transparent to the end user. There’s some degree of hype in the media that implies that users really care about these differences, but a company profile is a company profile, and the user shouldn’t have to go through completely different steps to create it depending on what audience it’s going to and what kind of network it’s going to be viewed on.
Another issue for us is graceful degradation. First, graceful degradation into HTML; Word currently supports a huge number of formatting, drawing, page layout, and similar features which have no corresponding representation in HTML. We need to handle that well. Second, in general for on-line documents, specifically on-line document elements should do something reasonable when you print the document.