Bill Seitz : I think treating every page as an outline is a better direction to go
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/z2005-06-17-PhilJonesWikiOutlining
I’m wondering what this means in the SdiDesk context. That every page should really be a tree, rather like an HTML or XML document?
That the basic, underlying representation of pages is plain-text is a non-negotiable virtue for me. I don’t want to get involved in XML as the base representation.
On the other hand, at present SdiDesk treats pages with a bunch of heuristic substitutions (much as traditional wiki does). You can go a long way with this approach, but my rewriting bullet-lists is actually an admission that a more structured way of thinking works for this part of a page.
The same is true of tables too. These are parsed into a special Table class.
And if I allow table objects and list objects to be embedded sub-parts of pages, why shouldn’t we treat the page as a list of “nodes” which can be either table, bullet-list or paragraph?
Could also be used to generate “table of contents” as with wikipedia . And allow finer (purple) addressing.
Aaargh! Too many ideas to implement. Not enough time. Worth mulling over though. Comments welcome, as usual.
Dave Winer thinks small is beautiful. Yup, and so is smiple. Plain text is simple. As a self-declared human, i can read plain text. XLM is for machines and/or th’ birds, as the case may be. Plain text should be holy. So You won’t negotiation this? Super. It’z useful to be able to crack open an mnp and read it.
Agreed (of course.) plaintext is as self-describing as you can get.
Thanks for the comment.