Nearly all of the posts on this blog for the past three months were written with WLW. Definitely let me know if you find code errors with any of them. I’m no code expert, and made my comment about WLW not screwing up the code mostly in terms of how it handles moving things in and out of bullets, block quotes, etc. When I do a lot of reformatting of a post in the WYSIWYG view, then check the “code view,” everything looks as it should. In other programs, too much messing with format in the WYSIWYG ends up leaving gaps and unclosed code in the “code view.” Beyond that, though, and particularly in terms of screen readers, I don’t have much insight. I look forward to your thoughts on this issue.

Also, thanks for the info about OpenOffice … they’re my “top pick” for word processors for students!

Can you point me to any posts that you have created using Windows Live Writer? In my experience, the code generated by Microsoft products is littered with unnecessary markup, and does not validate — in some situations, this renders the post unreadable to site visitors using screenreaders.

On a related note, there is a recent thread on the Drupal development listserv targeting OpenOffice integration with Drupal that would allow publishing from OpenOffice into Drupal (or any other open source app that supported a blog api). This would allow desktop publishing using OpenOffice, and would allow OpenOffice users to post content directly to a wide variety of web applications. One advantage of OpenOffice is that it generates clean markup.

Cheers,

Bill