Revdocs on a wiki

[David Bovill]

On 29 Oct 2005, at 04:41, Chipp Walters wrote:

> I couldn't agree with you more. The multiple books available for  
> HyperCard, including Dan Shafer's and Danny Goodman's excellent  
> tomes, were invaluable to me for learning how to work with  
> HyperCard. That is one of the reasons why I'm pushing for both  
> 'linearity' and 'xml' for whatever wiki is created.

Totally Chipp!

Wiki's as with HyperCard in fact (wiki's originated with, were  
inspired by, and were first programmed in HyperCard) - both have the  
same advantage and bloody aweful problem, of encouraging non- 
linearity. It is so easy to link anything to anything that you end up  
with a god-awful wiki mess, and you spend the rest of your time  
trying to introduce style sheets, templates and navigation structure.

It's great for the first 20 cards / pages -but as the thing scales?!?  
Also seems to have some serious long term mental effects on the  
coders ability to project manage their work - oh oh another one gone  
non-linear :)

One way to overcome this with wiki's is to look at the area of  
overlap with blog's. I started to use blog posts - good XMLRPC  
support there - for developer updates on project tasks - much better  
navigation. Wiki's are good at dictionaries and free flow association.

By the way Chipp - if you are interested in the XML / PDF stuff take  
a look at Apache Forrest - found it easy to install - simple and  
quick to get up and running very structured project based sites with  
great pdf export. Site navigation is a simple XML file. Done some  
work integrating it with Revolution.