On 10/28/14, 12:11 PM, "Chris Cunnington" <brasspen at 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 The ComSwiki can be superseded but there in no need to do that anything faster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