InContext Editing: A whole new editable web. All over again.
Adobe has just announced the preview of their upcoming technology, InContext Editing which purportedly allows Dreamweaver designers / developers to create static web pages and let their customers edit just parts of the web pages themselves.
The technology seems to be based around a public web based editing service (that’s run by Adobe) to allow people to use (surprise, surprise 
) just their browsers to edit the page’s content. The designer is free to use locked zones where (Dreamweaver’s template features will no-doubt hook in) to create their designs and to pre-designate editable zones that the end customers can directly modify at will. All they need is their web browser with the Flash Player installed (9.0.124+) and Local Storage enabled (for the InContext service to store temporary data, probably).
Will this usher in a whole new wave of pre-designed, (and thus, much better looking) web pages that can be cheaply designed by graphics and web developers to look great and yet be editable by the end users themselves? Sounds logical:
Web designers can concentrate on what they’re good at, designing graphical, good looking web pages. They can completely ignore the nitty gritty details where the “developer” needs to get involved, data persistance, and dynamic UI, which they’re not good at.
End-users can get much more direct access to their websites without being forced to pay the web designers an arm-and-a-leg to create all the dynamic infrastructure that is needed to allow them to manage their own content.
The developers can concentrate more on where they’re really needed (building Rich Internet Apps ? 😉 ) and like being anyway – I mean who really likes to code “basic” dynamic web pages, anyway, right?
Looks like a win-win-win situation to me.
InContext Editing is currently free, at least in this preview stage.
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This reminds me of a funny article that i had read written i think by joel on software, about software frameworks. He compared buying software to buying a hammer, and when he went and asked for a hammer to a shopkeeper, the shopkeeper gave him a hammer factory … Similarly, people, companies, institutions, have always just wanted a simple 5 page web site that they can update maybe 3 to 10 times a year. And we developers have sold Content Management Systems with a database backend, hardcore administrative interfaces, further spruced up with multi level caching, etc. etc. Adobe’s new move (hopefully) would allow people to buy hammers again! So maybe web pages will be sold by designers as just pages or page templates, and end users could buy them just like how they bought power point templates.
InContext works well, but is a bit of a hassle to setup. I hope Adobe doesn’t start charging for it. I’d hate to get a bunch of clients setup on it and then start getting a bill.