Two things have impelled me toward a bit of reflection:
1) Working on describing Swikis in my Squeak Book Chapter (Yes Mark! I'm
dilegently working at it. Really!)
2) Having a little SwikiTussle with Jim Benson on the Squeak Swiki. It's
the first time that *I'd* been accused of vandalizing a page. Quite
odd.
The former led me to the very interesting page on Ward's WikiWikiWeb (and
Je77, I'm finding it interesting to touch base with it again):
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWikiWorksNot
It made me think that a good bit of Swiki research has been going into
making the cases WhereWikiWorksNot work, or, at least, WorkBetter.
I also ran across this interesting quote (at
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MoreAboutMechanics):
-------------
And the program has an attitude. The program wants everyone to be an
author. So, the program slants in favor of authors at some inconvenience
to readers. Keep this in mind as you read more about mechanics.
-------------
It occurred to me that convenience to authors drove several of the
differences between, say, Mark's and my Swikis. For example, Mark's
audience prefered HTML, and mine was barely web literate so seemed to do
better with No-Tags markup.
It also occurred to me that one way to characterize ComSwiki is as having
the attitude of wanting everyone to be a SwikiDesigner :) This is a very
cool goal.
I've noticed the following bits of syntax tend not to work well:
{}--people confuse them for ()
- as the "unordered list" leading character, a lot of people like
to sign stuff with two dashes leading (e.g, --Bijan Parsia) and
this breaks hard; also
_____ as <hr>, I find it hard to type, hard to read and navigate
around, and tend to have to go back and replace my -----s; My
students (who aren't habituated to -----) seem to have similar
difficulties.
** as link delimiters, but that's been longstanding ;)
+ as "append". It's very surprising to get so much out of such a
little symbol
I've noticed these bits of syntax seem to
** as emphasis, but mostly because that's how I write email
[] for link formation; this is standard in WikiWorks wikis, and
and it seems to work rather well. I'd love to use it for
footnote type comments as well.
The table syntax. It's really, really hand.
I was wondering if anyone else had similar syntax observations.
Just a little rambling...
Cheers,
Bijan.
