Tim Bray has been looking at Blog clients - in particular, cross platform clients. He missed one - the client that ships with BottomFeeder. It's a WYSIWYG XHTML editor (which also allows you to flip over to plain tag mode if you actually like that sort of thing). It works with the MetaWebLog API, the Blogger API, and the MT API (as well the API to the Silt Server, a nice, portable, simple blog server).

There are some issues; the spell checker isn't really working right in the WYSIWYG mode yet, for instance. That'll get addressed soon though. I've tested the client against Blogger, and it works there - I've also tested other clients (like ecto and BlogJet) against my server using the MetaWebLog API, and the BottomFeeder client poster works the same way both those tools do - ditto the MT API.

What's it implemented in? Why, Smalltalk of course - Cincom Smalltalk, to be precise. I found some of Tim's assumptions a bit odd. Take this, for instance:

I don’t know of any other plausible clients that are Java and hence portable, so I think bloged is going to have legs, and is worth us funding some further development. Particularly when the Atom Publishing Protocol becomes ubiquitous. [ed: bloged being a Java client that Gosling and a few others at Sun have tossed together].

When Atom publishing format becomes ubiquitous? Here's the thing - Atom is going to be one format among many (as much as MetaWebLog API sucks). The problem for Atom format is that it's late to the game, and the other solutions - pathetic though they may be - actually work now. I'm sure I'll support Atom with my client eventually - but eventually could be awhile from now. Here's the big thing though - portable doesn't mean it has to be Java. We were doing binary portability in Smalltalk 15 years ago...