> I realise that HTML and Javascript are not going away any time soon.
> But, well, I have a long time-frame in mind, so I would be interested
> to know how durable a tiddliwiki can be expected to be. Any thoughts?
A TW file is plain-text: all your content, plus HTML, CSS, and
Javascript syntax surrounding it.
Fundamentally, each TW document is a complete system... all the
programming and content is incorporated into the same file; thus,
there is no separation of data and application and a matching version
of the 'TW runtime environment' will always be available.
Of course, this is all predicated on having a browser that is capable
of processing HTML, CSS, and Javascript... which is likely to be true
for *many, many* years. Even so, as we well know, future versions of
any given browser *might* not be completely 100% backward-compatible
with existing HTML, CSS or Javascript code, but even then, the odds of
being able to render your content (even if it doesn't look quite
right) are still extremely high.
Lastly, even if there are no such things as web browsers in the
future, the underlying data in every TW file is, as noted above, plain-
text (with a few HTML entities, e.g., " mixed in)... and it's
completely open-source... no binary encodings, no secret formats.
Thus, it will *always* be possible to read a TW file with a simple
text editor or a parse it with a small, custom-written text processing
program that can extract just the content, leaving the HTML, CSS and
Javascript behind.
> On the same topic, are there simple ways to transfer content to other
> forms that might serve as an archive of the information, and survive
> technology changes longer, even though the flexibility of the wiki
> might be lost?
I doubt that there is file format that is likely to survive longer
than simple plain-text...
enjoy,
-e
Eric Shulman
TiddlyTools / ELS Design Studios
> BiDi
P.S. You may want to change your GoogleGroups nickname... there a guy
here that goes by "BidiX" (the author of the very popular
UploadPlugin), and I expect that your chosen ID ("BiDi") will probably
lead to confusion.
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