On 10/28/14, 12:11 PM, "Chris Cunnington" brasspen@gmail.com wrote:
What are we trying to accomplish here? Why revisit the ComSwiki? Because it is the institutional memory of the Squeak community online. It is over ten years of articles. Over 6000. We want to preserve that. We want to build on that.
In some ways, what I¹m about to say is similar to the recent discussion about ImageSegments.
There are two things to consider here: the data; and, the application.
Ultimately we don¹t care about ComSwiki or XML files. We do care about the institutional memory of the community. That¹s the priority.
Let¹s look at data. These articles are in XML files. People here sneer at XML. Good for them. But notice that these files have lasted a decade. That¹s incredible. Show me any data gathered by Pier or SmallWiki or TinyWiki that has lasted a decade. Nowhere to be found.
Before Lukas was Mr. Seaside, he was Mr. Wiki. He didn¹t like XML. At all. He stored everything in some binary blob. If I give you a random binary blob from ten years ago, how well is it going to explain itself? If I give you an image segment from a decade ago, you wouldn¹t know where to start. XML explains itself. Very clearly. Mark Guzdial made an informed decision to keep documents independent of applications. In the Relax NG book from O¹Reilly that arrived yesterday on my doorstep (³Relax NG², 2004) it says exactly that on pg. 3.
That is a powerful principal of the Swiki design. It has served us well. Lukas can come back from Google right now and say it¹s not useful. Avi could show up and talk about Image Segments and DabbleDB and I don¹t think they could refute how useful this principal is. You could probably say the same thing about Fuel. It¹s the reason SQL is popular.
We are making the ComSwiki backward compatible. If it ain¹t broke don¹t fix it. The Swiki is remarkably well designed and remarkably reliable and has a clear separation between application and data.
The ComSwiki can be superseded but there in no need to do that anything faster than a snail¹s pace because it just works.
Chris
+1