Very interesting discussing topic.
We are trying to use MetaWiki as an internal communication, documentation, and knowlege base platform. I really find it is annoying to edit and update pages online because it is slow, especially from Internet. It is also painful to navigate back and forth in the wiki site to get the right pages to write on stuffs.
As a result, I continue to use a local small program named e-Stack Room to take notes and write my own knowlege base. Actually I have used it for years. It is much faster and well organized in tree view.
The offline and online topic is a long-life topic in computer science. I learnt from graduate Operating System course that there are a lot of researchers trying to handle it. It is about achieving remote and local storage coherence with less communication cost. I can review the course to see details if necessary. :-)
Maybe MetaWiki is not suitable for our goal. But if there is a local, faster, well organized version for it, I'd like to be the first one to try it.
On Tue, 7 Sep 2004 23:10:15 -0700, Krzysztof Kowalczyk kkowalczyk@gmail.com wrote:
Wouldn't it be by far the easiest if this program would be a small "web server" which would retrieve and serve Wikipedia pages to user's web browser of choice? That way it could be made quickly, small, and portable.
It would be. Also, it would suck. (not to mention that implies installing MySQL on user's machine - a requirement that I wouldn't like to put in an end-user application).
The whole point of writing an offline, native client is to provide much better browsing and/or editing experience for users. If it's not much better, people won't bother to install it.
Users don't care about how easy (or hard) it is to develop software. Only programmers care about that. Users care about value added. If there is no value added in native client, there is no reason for them to use it.
The only value added of such solution would be ability to run Wikipedia offline. While a noble thing, it's not really that much of a change. There's much more that could be done and much more will have to be done if anyone expects people to actually use said application.
Krzysztof Kowalczyk | http://blog.kowalczyk.info
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