Home » blogs » whirlpool's blog » A unified standard before WYSIWYG!
Submitted by whirlpool on Wed, 12/01/2005 - 13:34.

I wanted to comment on an interview on wikimedia foundation but found that I need an invitation to be able to edit the discussion wiki and add my comment!! So I decided to post it here.

The man who invented the Wiki (Ward Cunningham) can not see that its much more important to have a standard wiki-markup or structured text for all wikis before having WYSIWG tools for them. And that such WYSIWYG tool, and many other wonderful tools, need a standard format to work on.

It is very strange that he did not create an organization/body/foundation to help in promoting interoperability, despite his use of "about a dozen wikis". He can't see that today, each and every wiki programmer is desiging his own structured text / wiki-markup implementation for his own wiki. Leaving users locked with one wiki and can not freely migrate between them. Instead every wiki programmer is writing his own implementation of the same thing in a mediocre redudancy.

On the other hand the man who invented the Web (Tim Berners-Lee) founded the w3c in October 1994 to lead the technical revolution. And founded the principles to which allow interoperability, accomodate future technologies and decentralization. Through creating standards that allow the web to communicate with itself.

Anyways, it seems that Cunningham decided to leave it open like a wiki page for the users and developers to decide if they would colaborate on a standard. Or may be wikis are hyped about anyways and they are just tools like any text editor and not a revolutionary platform like the web.

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wikis are revolutionary
Alaa's picture
Submitted by Alaa on Wed, 12/01/2005 - 16:57.

but the thing about wiki is it conatins many different ideas each of them where an eye opener to social software developers, it is these seperate ideas that are revolutionary and they're finding their way in all sorts of webapps seperatly.

the way I think of it Wikis introduced

  • collaborative editing of docsuments using CVS style workflow
  • no user classification at all, all users have the same rights
  • workflow is transparent to end audience
  • simplified structural markup readable by mere mortals
  • cheap page creating (on the fly)
  • flexible sitewide crossreferencing engine (on the fly)
  • the revolutionary idea of managing information as a soup of unordered data plus the ability to create different views and organization for it (it could be cross linked, chained, put in a heirarchy, searched for etc, all easily cheaply and at the same time).
  • the most revolutinary idea of letting humans manage the system not computers, while giving us human operators tools to make life easier (basically by making mistakes cost nothing and cause no chain reactions)

again Wikis are example of total seperation of policy and mechanism, a wiki gives you mechanism, wiki authors invent policy, many CMS systems are copying this idea (drupal is very much that), Wikis are the only ones where the policy is organic and ever changing and requires no further agreement.

the reason why there is a mess is because porogrammers do see these features or properties as seperate, non of them are the esence of wiki that has to be stabilized at some point in time.

a unified syntax would be nice but any attempt at making a syntax flexible enough to accomodate all needs will simply reinvent XML.

tab3an the situation would probably have been helped if either the first WikiWikiWeb or MediaWiki had the best syntax (seeing as they're obvious leaders) but truth is their syntax sucks in many ways.

cheers, Alaa

http://www.manalaa.net "i`m feeling for the 2nd time like alice in wonderland reading el wafd"


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