TextEdit -- Apple's "part-of-the-deal" (i.e., installed as part of the operating system) text editor/word-processor -- introduced saving in Word and HTML formats with the version for OS X Panther 10.3.

But there's one glaring inconsistency: smart quotes are still not a user-definable preference for most users.

Oh you can set them, if you know the hotkeys. But that still falls short of AppleWorks, Microsoft Word and a gaggle of other text editors and word-processing applications available for Mac OS X. Granted, HTML is better off without them (consider how much otherwise extraneous code it takes Word to generate in order to "fake" them -- no wonder the début OS X version of Macromedia Dreamweaver had a menu command "Clean up Microsoft HTML"). I also concede this may not be altogether true for the universal-binary TextEdit version in OS X 10.4 Tiger. But how much space does a line of dialog text at 12-point Lucida Grande and a radio button or checkbox really take up? And if it is true that the preference has finally made it to the application's preference dialog(s), what motivated Apple to wait this long -- Text Edit itself debuted in OS X 10.0 Public Beta {October 2000-April 2001) -- is still a mystery.

Then there's the long-term, the "future" of the little freebie.

So what's it gonna be, Apple? Are you manoeuvring TextEdit towards Word? Or is it all just a cheap pose?