[Pmwiki-users] More blue skye stuff...

Christian Ridderström chr
Tue Feb 3 15:25:27 CST 2004


Well, inspired by JF, here are some blue stuff ideas from me. This is far 
from thought through, so bear with me. And a *long* way down the road to 
I'd say. Basically I think it separates down into these three categoreies:

* Concurrent collaboration
* WYSIWYM editing (as in LyX, more on this below)
* Math for wikipages

!!Concurrent collaboration

Allowing authors to concurrently work on the same page. This would require 
real-time merging and conflict management etc. I'm not sure if 
this is even possible using form-based editing, in the end it might 
require editing using a special kind of software (in my mind a form of 
pmwiki-mode).


!!Editing according to What You See Is What You Mean

WYSIWYM is not as easily explained maybe, but one point is that you 
shouldn't have to bother with detailed layout issues, the contents is 
what matters. (Appearance is still important to *communicate* your content 
of course).

For instance, when you are editing an itemized list, it should look like
an itemized list on your screen to make it easy for you to see what you
are doing.  Then when you export it to your desired format, it should
"fix" it's appearance in a nice systematic way according to output format.
We (the authors) shouldn't be bogged down with tiny layout details (or at
the worst only settle on a layout once -- or if we enjoy fiddling with the
appearance). And even if we output pure HTML that was viewed using
browsers we will still not be able to control exactly what the reader
sees.

Ok, now what I envision is a tool that lets you edit a page in a WYSIWYM 
fashion. (Yes, I thought about this because I realized that I might be 
able to get LyX to import and export wiki source, which means I basically 
already have the tool).


!!Math for wikipages

I think the math editor in LyX is awesome, and in the end I was actually
doing quite a bit of vector algegra using LyX for jotting down results
(rather than using paper and pen...)  Anyway, I think it'd be really cool
if we could make writing math on a wikipage as easy as writing normal
text. However, I can't imagine "normal" people writing something that 
looks like LaTeX as wiki markup, so a tool is needed.


So, are any of these ideas blue enough?

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m                           http://www.md.kth.se/~chr





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