Description of problem:

At the moment users can edit content specs in the web editor with no validation. This results in broken content specs. It's especially a problem for new users, because they rightly expect that the system would not allow them to do something that would break their stuff without warning them.

Solution:

The immediate solution should be to make content specs read-only in the web editor. It can be done trivially with JavaScript:

if (topic.isContentSpec()) makeEditorReadOnly();

If you wanted to make it user friendly, you could put a link to the death star content spec editor, a GUI wrapper for the content spec processor, while you are waiting for your own web-based solution. Otherwise, a notice telling them to use the csprocessor to edit the spec (please- no modal dialogs! :-) would be good.