I’m eavesdropping on a fascinating email exchange between Chris Dent (of Blue Oxen and Socialtext fame) now working on TiddlyWeb and Frank McIngvale who’s project is WikklyText.
I haven’t had time to take it all in yet. But it looks like Chris has got TiddlyWeb working on the Google App. Engine. And Frank has got a stand-alone TiddlyWiki markup language working.
The main idea of TiddlyWeb continues Chris’s focus (since Blue Oxen days with EEKim, I’d guess) on sub-page level elements on wiki. Remember Blue Oxen’s thing was Purple Numbers, individual paragraph Ids. Here, he’s using “Tiddlers“, the individually named, sub-page elements that TiddlyWiki would show or hide, and assembling them in a new, looser collections called “bags”.
From what I understand so far, having named tiddlers rather than arbitrary purple numbers is definitely a move in the right direction. (In the sense that it makes the small pieces human-addressable as well as machine-addressable.) In fact each item is addressed by a combination of Tiddler name + bag name (where bag is more a kind of policy or query)
There’s long discussion going on right now about URIs (which seem to become almost queries or operations on the bags) to access the tiddlers in a ReSTful way that I’m still absorbing.
Anyway, they’re definitely “banging the rocks together” in wiki and breaking pages up into a finer granularity. And, after Twitter’s discovery of the virtues of 140 character status updates, now generalized to a theory of micro-blogging, the world is definitely ready for a wiki micro-chunking experiment. Who knows where it will lead?
I’ve thought of Tiddlers more like pages than components of pages. Though the way that TiddlyWiki pops things up in the stack does blur that distinction.
I guess because they have concrete names, the difference pretty much evaporates. Addressable Things is what’s important.
But I read Chris as being particularly interested in the capacity to compose documents (either single or multi-page) out of some kind of algebra or query on these multiple fragments.
That’s where the focus seems to be.
Phil – great to hear your comments. I’m insanely happy to watch what Chris is doing; he’s turned a rather cranky and shakey vision into a wonderfully literate and readable chunk of code. Someday all servers will be that dumb….