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.