Another Swiki question

John Hinsley jhinsley at telinco.co.uk
Fri Oct 12 15:13:23 UTC 2001


Mark Guzdial wrote:
> 
> > But, if you look down at the bottom, you'll see that the gifs
> >are not only inlined (as they ought to be) but also appear at the bottom
> >of the page, too. (As is the linked .html.)
> >
> >How on earth did I manage to do that?
> 
> By default, when you upload an attachment, the attachment is linked
> in at the bottom of the page.  There are radio buttons on the Attach
> page (just below the Browse and Upload buttons) where you can turn
> off this default.
> 
> Our main goal in designing the Swiki is supporting classes, and even
> at a techy place like here at Georgia Tech, most of our students
> don't grok a lot about hierarchical filesystems, FTP, etc.  We did
> some versions where the Attach page was basically a front-end to an
> FTP server, but that confused lots of people.  In the current
> version, the metaphor is "attaching a file to a page" (as one would
> attach a file to email) -- by default, the file is in a page-specific
> directory, and the link to the file is automatically inserted into
> the page for you.  You can change these defaults, if you want to, but
> that meets the needs of our most common users.

Thanks Mark

I eventually thought my way round this by thinking of the uploaded
attachments as entities which had been taken into an image. (Which
probably isn't what really happens!) 

The Swiki is a fine tool and I'm pretty sure it's easier to learn and
use than html + ftp. It just shows that hard won metaphors are difficult
to give up! (Which doesn't mean we shouldn't do so!)

A recent example of this is Lyn A Headley's [Goodie] QuizMorph which
uses a flashcard metaphor. I know that after years of exposure to text
boxes and buttons, that's the "metaphor" I'd have chosen, but I know
that Lyn's metaphor is better: and indeed, when I'm quizzing myself on
Italian vocabulary, I use flashcards!

Cheers

John

-- 
If you don't care about your data, like file systems which automagically
destroy themselves and have money to burn on 3rd party tools to keep
your
system staggering on, Microsoft (tm) have the Operating System for you.




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list