A swiki editor

Daniel Vainsencher danielv at netvision.net.il
Tue Jul 22 20:35:33 UTC 2003


Yup, that sounds like a good direction, except that we need to stay
grounded in what can later be extended to a swiki. 

I've studied a little and like the approach of SmallWiki/Gardner - 
* In image (server) representation of page contents is a parse tree (as
opposed to Swiki's string)
* Various formats (html display, edit form) are generated using
visitors.

This makes it very easy to create the XML format - write another
visitor. Or we might reuse SmallWikis code which does this for
externalization.

Gardner externalization uses SmartRefStreams, which I'm not very happy
with, but will do for a start.

I'm thinking about a game plan like this -
1. Create an image based editor that uses Gardners parse trees and
storage (rendering it into Text, probably, as the UI).
- This is an immediately usable first product. 
2. Create/borrow XML format for trees. Use it for externalization.
Create a request like /mywiki/1.xml, which passes the XML for the tree,
so our parser doesn't have to HTML scrape it. Convert the editor to use
HTTP to get/save the trees.
- This already allows new such swikis to be shared and conviniently
edited remotely.

Comments? 
Want to play together on this?

Daniel

Brent Vukmer <bvukmer at blackboard.com> wrote:
> Why not tackle the simpler of the two problems first?
> 
> E.g., ignore the HTTP/Swiki stuff for now and just create the local
> SquikiPad thingie?  Regarding persistence -- I agree with you that flat
> files are the simplest way to share for now.  What file format?  Should
> we just use XHTML and extend it with some Squeak-specific tags?
> 
> If I were building this, I would assume at first that Squeak images were
> the only clients ( but I would use a file format that anyone could
> create/edit in NotePad ... )



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