Still pining for marginalia

I still long for a web page composition environment - I could call it a blogging tool - that easily and quickly lets me edit a stream of pages that are themselves composed of blocks or chunks, all tied together in some way, and where writing in the margins is a first class operation and not some awful CSS or Javascript hack.

I've tried Drupal, but the edit environment is a mess and it looks like it would be a deep dive to design something. Some wikis look like they might do the trick at least for the raw ease of edit, but then you lose the nice page flow of the blog.

This is why I still compose on paper - when what you're writing really needs four columns on one page and three on the next and six skinny ones with a big footer every so often, and to do that all you have to do is draw lines on your quadrille paper, it's a real relief.

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Comments

[Bill Tozier]

You know, it's a sad thing to say, but you could do this easily enough with a GUI on the editing side.

What I think you want is semantically-defined and locally-associated -- and automatically generated -- marginalia, yes? Because everything but the last bit, one could use a GUI web design toolkit to create.

What I'd like is to select a passage on-screen, right-click the selection, get a menu that says "Annotate", have that open a little box, and then have that save a graphically called-out marginal note, with faint yellowish highlighting or a line of some sort.

And a pony :)