Can you do complex editing of Word Documents in a browser?

Question

A friend of mine wants to have an application where people can upload documents in Word (or text) format, and then allow people to make edits to those documents within a browser.

Is there any mechanism that would support adding text "bubbles" for adding comments? Either floating, or off to the side.

Being able to save back to Word format is a must too. Or at least, some format supported by Word, that would still be editable. Saving it as an image is not acceptable.

I was thinking about opening the Word Document in an FCK Editor window, but FCK only seems to have "normal" inline text editing capabilities (although it is great).

Is this feasible?

Answer 1

Yes it is feasible. Google has done that (and it does have comments). So has Adobe. I'm sure there is more.

Answer 2

Xopus provides a programmable platform that allows you to define editable XML within a WYSIWYG environment. You could use it to define what you want to edit (XML), against which rules you want to edit it (an XSD) and how you want it to look while you edit it (XSL). Then you tie that all together with the Javascript API.

In other words, you could pretty easily define a document that contains multiple paragraphs with optional comments and then have them displayed as bubbles exactly the way you want them; when saved, a script on the server could be executed that converts the XML to a Word document.

Take a look at the demos.