> I must say, now that I have heard of it, that I *immensely* dislike > the idea of losing wikitext. You can say that wikitext will still be > supported but clearly if plugins are going to be built around html > tags and direct jQuery style DOM traversal, then using wikitext is > going to suffer an immense loss of popularity, making it de facto > impossible to keep using it.
There is no question in my mind of losing wikitext. My personal belief is that wikitext is a beautiful tool, and a fundamental advance in how we think about formatting, moving it from the domain of popup windows and toolbars and into the domain of things you can type. I love that wikitext elevates links to be part of the punctuation, and as a result I see people using wikitext using linking much more densely and usefully. First, as you note, TW5 will support wiki text directly, and will support plugins for rendering other wiki formats. This isn't some little nod to backwards compatibility, though. The overall design is the same as with classic TW: macro rendering is done by converting text to DOM elements, and macro refreshing remains, as it has always been, a DOM operation, not a text processing operation. Secondly, my objective with the WYSIWYG editor is to be able to bring the best of wikitext to wysiwyg. As you can see if you switch a tiddler in the TW5 demo to edit mode, the macros are represented as proxy elements that can (eventually) be typed, dragged and dropped and so on, treated as if they were characters in the text flow of the tiddler. So it won't be necessarily to invoke some funky little pull down menu to select a macro, you'll be able to just type it, and the editor will automatically macro-ize it. > I like the idea of a WYSIWYG editor but look at Wikispaces.com (imo > the best online online wiki hoster, even if it lacks a lot of power): > they implemented a beautiful wysywig editor without letting go of > wikitext. Wikispaces + transclusion + macros == my ideal *simple* wiki > site. ((Wikispaces can never be as powerful as TiddlyWiki, but it > makes up for it with great themes, reasonable documentation, lots of > widgets that you can include via a friendly GUI, and a great admin > interface (much like Mac OSX))). Wikispaces is not an application > platform like TW, its a simple wiki hosting site. But one thing they > did right: they allow for *both* wysiwyg AND wikitext. Nobody is going > to be writing in HTML once the wysiwyg editor is there. Writing in > HTML sucks ass. It is unnecessarily verbose (for the context of a > handwritten document) which is the very reason that wiki's became so > popular. I also like WikiSpaces, we use it a lot at unamesa. I'm not sure why you're against being able to edit the HTML directly as well as using the WYSIWYG editor. > Now I understand that a regular wiki doesn't expose its wikitext but > feeds everything through a rendering engine, that is, the > representation is always html, but for TiddlyWiki this isn't possible > since a search engine will simply traverse the entire html file > without caring about javascript rendering. So for search engines it > makes sense to keep it in html. But for a user it doesn't make sense. > However, to decide on the basis of search engine coverage to change > your internal //editing style// seems like a baaad thing. (And For me the key driver wasn't search engines, but rather the observation, again and again, that the lack of WYSIWYG editing is an obstacle to people trying out TiddlyWiki. > remember, when a search engine indexes that precious HTML, the link to > the html file will open the default view, and you are not going to see > the tiddlers that you want unless a search engine magically makes use > of anchors and the like.) The way that other applications resolve this is to have client side code that looks at the referrer, and detects the search engine search string, and then does a TiddlyWiki search for the same search term. I believe there is a classic TiddlyWiki plugin that does this, too. > In short, if we going to lose wikitext, you are probably going to lose > me (although I don't see where I'll go, except sticking tenaciously to > the old tikiwiki.) For TW5 probably all of the plugins will have to be > rewritten (??) so migrating to TW5 is going to be a pain. Not that it > matters, just giving it as input. Plugins will indeed have to be rewritten for TW5. Hence the discussion about striking a balance between backwards compatibility, and the opportunities offered by breaking it. Best wishes Jeremy > ~Xen > > On 29 mrt, 23:32, Jeremy Ruston <[email protected]> wrote: >> In TiddlyWiki5, tiddlers are typically stored HTML so I think that it >> would make sense to handle your scenario by structuring your records >> as unobtrusively marked up HTML, and then using jQuery selector-style >> or even XSLT syntax to chop each tiddler up into it's constituent >> parts. There would some equivalent of TiddlerName##Selector to >> retrieve one of these new structured slices. >> >> Cheers >> >> Jeremy >> >> >> >> >> >> On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 10:15 PM, Alex Hough <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> > Xen, TwDevMen >> >> > Are these ideas that could feed into TW 5? [1] >> >> > I am wondering that some problems will take considerable time to solve and >> > get working and by the time they are solved they will have been removed by >> > comprehensive re-designs. >> >> > I was very excited to read about TW 5 and would like to start messing about >> > with it. It seems to be more profitable ( and exciting?) for me to learn >> > the >> > new TW5 and the html5, jQuery and jQuery UI stuff rather than continuing to >> > get to grips with TW 2.6. >> >> > Alex >> >> > [1]http://www.tiddlywiki.com/tiddlywiki5/ >> >> > -- >> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> > "TiddlyWikiDev" group. >> > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> > [email protected]. >> > For more options, visit this group at >> >http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywikidev?hl=en. >> >> -- >> Jeremy Ruston >> mailto:[email protected]://www.tiddlywiki.com > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "TiddlyWikiDev" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywikidev?hl=en. > > -- Jeremy Ruston mailto:[email protected] http://www.tiddlywiki.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWikiDev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywikidev?hl=en.
