Re: [wmii] New Website?

On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 12:09:43AM -0400, John Nowak wrote:
>Since this is a wiki designed for outwards presentation and not inward
>collaboration, why not use a fully-fledged syntax like Markdown
>(http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/)? Just drop it into the
>existing code (I assume it is written well enough that this can be done) and
>be done with it. It'll look nice, produce valid html, have a nice and
>powerful syntax, and do the job it is intended for. No need for a rewrite I
>don't think. No matter how bad garbeam says it is, I'm sure it is better
>than 95% of the shit that is out there. I do not think a revision history
>and full reverting interface is necessary given that you need a password to
>edit, and the number of people editing is very small (less than ten, I
>assume). Just backup as normal with a cron script. The amount of time you'd
>spend implementing this as part of the wiki will never be recovered unless
>you're reverting pages rather often. Given the nature of the site, I expect
>such things to be rare, maybe once a month at most.

First of all, we won't go into the amount of time I spend on implementing it.
I'm writing this because I want an excuse to write code in ruby. If you have
any doubts as to how bad it is not, look at the code. It was written as a
prototype and that's what it is. It's by no means better than 95% of the shit
out there (though it's certainly better than a few php wikis out there).

The wiki syntax is a more difficult issue. Look, for instance, at the plan 9
wiki syntax, which is designed to be as readable in acme as on the web. It's
mostly a matter of whether the look of the HTML or the wiki syntax is more
important. Considering the acme client that's already on the wiki, this is
obviously a consideration.

The revision history is something I can live with or without. I'm not really
worried about spamming or abuse, but it would be pretty easy to lose a lot of
information in two commits even with only 10 or so people editing it,
especially given the lack of collision detection. Anyway, it would be trivial
to implement and it's more a matter of whether it's 'in the spirit of the
wiki'.

-- 
Kris Maglione
Most people deserve each other.