The morning started with a speech by George P. Landau on the development of the Victorian Web – a hypertext that started way before the Web. His basic premise: “the World Wide Web is essentially Hypertext 0.5.” I like it.
Stuff he mentioned about older hypertext systems:
Systems mentioned:
He also went into the question of why the web turned into a killer application. He started with benefits compared to Gopher, continued on to embedding images, and mentioned some wiki benefits. These include wikis being a read-write form hypertext, wikis enabling intended and uninteded collaboration, enabling multiple points of view, offer expandable or extendable documents, allows for different hypertext genres, simultaneous emphasis on multiple approaches and unresolveable problems. Apparently a point of view not shared by Wikipedia.
The Victorian Web is actually not a wiki. It’s a website where the author encourages contributions via email. He doesn’t believe that the delay between submission and publication is a problem. Collaboration and discussion turn out to be submissions of separate but linked documents. This gives his site a static and stable appearance. Documents just... stay. A totally different contribution and discussion culture compared to what has developed on wikis.
Related:
Architectural Component of Hypertext Systems
A talk about the Lively Kernel – a system using browsers, SVG, javascript, and no HTML, DOM, or CSS.
Draw objects, copy, drag, program, easy to create new primitive objects and add behaviour. Then use these to start creating a programming environment. Pick classes, look at methods, change them. Then implement a debugger & profiler based on that. All inside a “page” that loads pieces of Javascript. Loading, saving, as well as revisions are handled via WebDAV – my assumption being that this is what Subversion gives you for free.
Personally, I was most fascinated by the idea that this is in fact a SVG editor like Inkscape, written in Javascript, that has revisions. It’s awesome! We should switch the backend to a wiki (or use a wiki with WebDAV support available like Oddmuse or JSP Wiki) and just edit SVG stored on wiki pages!
Related:
The Lively Kernel: A Wiki of Active Objects
2006-08-31 Oddmuse and SVG Files
Too bad I didn’t find any really interesting sessions today. There was a session on the state of WikiCreole, companies hiring wiki gardeners and reportings on their excellent results. There was a session on distributed wikis collecting pitfalls but not finding any solutions.
companies hiring wiki gardeners
a session on distributed wikis
I also spent some time sitting in the sun, doing nothing. I didn’t feel like listening to paper presentations because I usually feel that the authors aren’t good presentors.
There was an excellent bus trip through town, a boat trip up and down the river, and dinner at a restaurant. That really gave all of us another opportunity to talk to new faces, and so I ended up talking a lot with Christoph Sauer & Andreas Gohr (JPS Wiki, Doku Wiki, Wiki Matrix), Alain Désilet (multilingual wikis, WikiSym organisation in general), and others.
Too bad I apparently missed some excellent paper presentations. 😄
#Conferences #WikiSym #WikiSym2008 #SVN #Javascript