Not to sound critical, but using Word as a page editor -- even if that in some way simplifies the pulishing process -- I just have grave reservations about... Unless you'd try to parse a resulting doc using something like libwv, converting it to a more sensible XML/XHTML/HTML representation...
I'd say that a properly handled textarea could be a lot more flexible than that. Both RTE and HTMLArea linked from this thread, as well from related threads look quite promising.
Now, generating an RTF document out of whatever is stored in the dB -- that is something *very* useful. This could, probably, be extended to be even more flexible -- why not generating an XML doc out of the dB, applying an XSL stylesheet to it and then generating an HTML/RTF/PDF/whatever representation? One step in that direction could be making sure that all of the generated validate against XHTML TR...
