Jan Hidders wrote:
On Sat, Aug 10, 2002 at 11:29:49PM -0700, Michael R. Irwin wrote:
The sections on engineering and technology are not
going to improve very fast until we have some type of
easy graphics markup for at least diagrams.
You want editable graphcs? Good news. There is an open W3C standard for
that, it's called SVG (scalable vector graphics), and it's in XML. We could
probably integrate that by considering it as just another image format. You
could even give it an edit screen if one wanted to edit it by hand, but the
simplest would be to have people download it and edit it with an SVG editor
and then re-upload it. As far as representing it goes, Mozilla is beginning
to support it, there is a free Acrobat view/plug-in, but for other browsers
we would have to convert it to PNG, and yes, svg2png exists. :-)
There's even a Wiki about this:
http://www.protocol7.com/svg-wiki/default.asp
Why didn't we think of this before?
Sorry Jan, I did not mean to imply that graphics editing
had not been considered. I was attempting to weigh in
on the point that graphics is an important presention tool
for our stated project goals.
I agree we must press on with what we have but it makes
me nervous to hear people claiming the text only wiki
interface is an advantage that should be preserved.
I do not know enough about the software we are currently
using to know if this is feasible or worth looking into but
there seems to be a full suite of open/free source tools coming
available to assist distributed teams in building and managing
web sites and content with version controlled collaboration
based on W3C open standards.
The links I list below state goals and objectives that
sound much like Wikipedia's current functional infrastructure
to me.
Perhaps we could plan on completing the current round of
development for our current simple text based wiki.
The next round of development, or a separate parallel branch
starting soon, (or perhaps already started?) could aim for a
complete markup environment as per W3C standards, specifications
that allows users to use the next generation of markup WYSIWYG
tools of their choice, i.e. the ones that get out of
vaporware stage.
Obviously a key point in any feasibility study would be
defining the interface or porting route between our
current target system and the next generation infrastructure
so the database would port with few errors and relatively intact.
I doubt we want to hand edit a couple of hundred
thousand articles.
These links look applicable to any such feasibility study:
http://www.w3.org/Jigsaw/
http://www.webdav.org/
What is WebDAV?
Briefly: WebDAV stands for "Web-based Distributed Authoring and
Versioning". It is a set of extensions to the HTTP
protocol which allows users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote web
servers.
http://www.webdav.org/other/faq.html
http://www.webdav.org/mod_dav/
http://www.midgard-project.org/midgard/
Midguard looked particularly interesting as it claims
to integrate well with PHP.
Once again, please accept my apologies. I realize that
much of the discussion going over my head on the list is
in regard to these standards. If there is currently a
project plan or milestone schedule file somewhere laying
these things out as a loose set of current intentions
a link to it would be appreciated. If detailed discussion
is available in the list archive the approximate time
frame would also be useful and appreciated.
regards,
mirwin