> I've often found myself wanting to build basically entire Swiki books > right from Squeak without having to resort to a browser. While it's nice > that anyone can edit these pages "just" using the browser I'd rather > have some sort of local editor where I can just type text, add emphasis, > drop in morphs etc. In short, I hate this idea of an "editing mode" - > it's so countrary to all of Squeaks goals.
I'm really a big fan of the text-only entry, but I find the TEXTAREA field in HTML to be limiting. In particular, I'd be a little more interested in a LyX-style WYSIWYM front-end to Swiki than a FrontPage WYSIWYG front-end. So, I'm somewhat interested. On the other hand, there are huge problems with this idea. 1. We need it to work out of the box for 99% of our users. That means no Squeak. If you mean to just have it for your purposes in Squeak, then I guess you don't care, but it makes it much less interesting for us researchers. A Java applet is about the only thing that comes to my mind that would be active, cross-platform, and already installed. You won't find me creating one of those though. 2. Time. A very nice feature of CoWeb is that the time between going from view to edit mode is nearly instantaneous. In contrast, projects (or an kind of applet/squeaklet) would take much longer. I feel this would seriously negatively impact usage. 3. Text is actually quite nice in getting people to collaborate and share a space. A GUI only would get people to spend more time concentrating on looks instead of content. > Anyone ever thought about this?! Yep. I've though about it and basically gave up. Peace and Luck! Je77
