Mark Boulton, writing on his personal blog:
One of the other pain points of a complex dynamic website, where ‘pages’ are created with bits of content from all over the place is ‘where the hell do I go to find that bit of content to edit it?’. That is a painful moment in a content person’s daily life. Normally, after watching them, they go off deep into search, or ask someone else who knows better. Accessing these smaller nuggets of logic-based content is problematic. This is why inline-editing and WYSIWYG is coming to the fore – addressing the use case in the live environment.
Why is this a problem?
As I said before, it’s hiding the truth. That being, the content is more than you can see. Instead of inline editing of the content, why not just make the start of that journey a little easier? Why not provide a way of quickly getting to exactly that bit of content with a link? There we will see all of the stuff that is the content but not the words: the display logic, taxonomies, meta data etc. But if we want to change a type, we can do that with our little toolbar.
I think I agree with Mark here. Have a single, canonical editor, and allow multiple easy access points to it. (I’ve done this on my personal blog to great effect.)
That said, publishing — even on the web — relies a lot on how things look. No matter how much semantics you put into it, “how does it look?” will always be a critical question.