Post Hoary

[Simon Michael]

I'm not advocating any particular change here, because I think you guys 
are kicking ass and probably don't want to be guinea pigs for crazy 
next-generation wiki/doc tools. So feel free to ignore this. But let's 
not forget to think outside the box too.

Re wiki markup not being presentation neutral - first, at least some 
wiki markups, of which I know and like Structured Text best, were 
intended to be presentation neutral. STX is, assuming you don't indulge 
in html tags. It's simply a less verbose, more intuitive form of 
structured markup. Granted no-one has yet written a PDF renderer for it. 
(RST is similar and does render to PDF and everything else as far as I 
know.)

Second, what if you had wiki pages whose markup was docbook ? All it 
needs is a plugin to do whatever rendering process you currently do 
offline. You could point your docbook editor of choice at it.

Re revision control: what if the ubuntu zope site, or just the wiki 
pages, was stored as plain files on the filesystem (via 
DirectoryStorage, APE, or some other tool) ? What if those files were 
revision-controlled ? What if a svn commit was instantly reflected on 
the website, and pages could be edited using either method ? I think 
people in the zope world are successfully doing things close to this 
right now.

Jeff Schering wrote:
 > Posting to the
 > list is much easier than tracking down the right wiki page, learning
 > wiki markup, getting a wiki password, and then making the change.

Not always. Switching gears away from reading docs, finding the right 
list address, the right person to send to, the right format to send, the 
right subject, firing up your slow mail client - these can often be more 
burdensome than making a fix to the page that's *right there*.

I agree that text formatting should be obvious and documented right 
there in the form. Also I agree that the need for registration and daily 
login sucks; personally I'd drop it and try hard to deal with spam 
another way. At the least, login should be be much easier and more 
robust and something you rarely have to do again.