wikis (was Re: [BBLISA] Suggestions for a documentation system)

[John Stoffel]

Mark> You Luddite You.... ;-)

Yup, I'm a luddite.  But I must admint, I've been saying that the web
sucks for interactive work since the '94 WWW conference and probably
before.  It's just not there.  

Mark> Most wikis will let you cutnpaste.  copy the file to an emacs
Mark> buffer, edit, and paste back?  TWiki even has a "raw text"
Mark> display button for the cut and you can click "edit" to paste it
Mark> back.

Which completely obviates the need for a wiki, since I can just open
an emacs buffer (emacs is always running for me...) and just write a
note and store it in a directory. 

Mark> It's not elegant.  But then, neither is keeping all your
Mark> documentation in unprotected flat files.  Effective (in a
Mark> limited way) yes.  Elegant?

And what is a wiki but a bunch of files?  And how well protected are
they?  If I wanted, I could do RCS/CVS and checkout/checkin my files
when I edit them.  Not that hard to setup either.  

The point I was trying to make is that HTML is NOT a good interactive
system where you need to do data entry.  Especially data entry in
large volume.  

Mark> On Fri, 2005-10-21 at 09:48 -0400, John Stoffel wrote:
>> The only problem I have with most Wiki's is that web browsers *suck*
>> for editing any amount of text over 1 line.  Really.  Especially since
>> I've got emacs (and to a much lesser extent vi) keybindings into my
>> head and I don't want to let them go.  
>> 
>> The web is a great publishing medium.  And a decent minor input
>> medium.  But it is NOT a good way to do serious data entry, even with
>> the rise of the AJAX programming model, etc.
>> 
>> This is why I still use flat text files in a directory to store my
>> notes and such.  No, I don't RCS them.  No, I can't browse them on the
>> web.  But I can grep and edit very quickly and they have the info I
>> need.
>> 
>> So maybe what I'm saying is that I want an emacs wiki client, without
>> the web browser (w3m?) insanity/overhead.
>> 
>> John
>> 
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Mark> !DSPAM:43595b25262369367420173!