RE: [ba-ohs-talk] New backlink metadata; mhpurple v0.2 released
On Sat, 2 Mar 2002, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote: (01)
> I love Wiki's (and, duh, purple numbers would work great there)!! (02)
... (03)
> (The one thing about Wiki pages is that the purple numberings are best
> generated on the fly, so there is a discontinuity around the page having
> been edited between the time the link was sent out and was later used for
> access. This raises the interesting problem of having purple numbers apply
> to a Wicki-graph in a *version* of a Wicki-page for citations to be workable
> at this level.) (04)
I actually set off to hack purple numbers into TWiki, only to quit for a
number of reasons (TWiki is too complex to use, and my purple number hack
wasn't as clean as I wanted it to be). However, I thought about it a lot,
and came to a number of conclusions: (05)
* Purple numbers have to be immutable. They cannot be generated
on-the-fly if the content is not static. (E-mail archives are, which is
why on-the-fly purple number generation is reasonable.) (06)
My hack would actually add tags representing the purple numbers within
the Wiki text, and those tags would be interpreted to display the
appropriate purple numbers. (07)
* Wikis already have finer-grain addressability than typical web sites, in
that they encourage authors to break concepts down more granularly. (08)
* One use of purple numbers is annotation. Not an issue with Wikis; you
just edit the page. (09)
The final conclusion is that a Wiki is a perfect candidate OHS
application. It has collaborative editing and back-links. If you
designed the Wiki to use a standard, graph-based repository like NODAL,
you would get the following wins: (010)
* Granular version-control and access-control. (011)
* Integration and interoperability with all other applications using the
same APIs. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to transclude a Wiki
node in an e-mail, or for that matter, into Lucid Fried Eggs, which is
really a Wiki with typed links. (012)
Incidentally, you can reframe a number of apps as essentially graph
editors. XML editors? A tree editor, which of course is a type of graph.
Threaded discussion forums and blogs are another examples of tree-based
discussions. Lucid Fried Eggs, QuestMap/Mifflin, Topic Maps and RDF
editors -- all graphs. (013)
If all of these tools shared a common API, and if there were tools that
implemented these APIs, then all of these tools would be interoperable.
The universe of those interoperable apps makes up the OHS, and the APIs
are what enables all of this. (014)
-Eugene (015)
--
+=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+
| "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they |
+===== can have an excuse to drink alcohol." --Steve Martin ===========+ (016)