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Moin Thomas,
On Wednesday 30 March 2005 23:21, Thomas Gries wrote:
Dear Tels,
your extension script is very very nice, but graphviz/dot is the older and an established program - since years !
- and comes already with a
powerful set of commands which leaves no room for further wishes.
Actually, it left me with quite a few wishes (not so awkward syntax, more pretty output, alternatives to grafical output, etc), and that is why I started to develop my own solution (which could use some more work, of course).
I am not saying that graphviz is bad or should not be used - I am just saying that:
* maybe a different syntax should be used to write the graphs * maybe different outputs of the final graphs than the (ugly in my opionion) images/graphic should be used
Please have a first look to the gallery page with plenty of examples and dot source codes[1] and the manual [2].
Actually, I looked at the gallery, and these graphs do not appeal to me nor do I think the examples of the dot source code is self-explanatory, or fully intuitiv (sp?) to understand.
Please consider also to google for "graph drawing" - this is not only one but _the_ generic term for visualisation of dependencies and graphs.
I'll do that, one can only learn :)
In the meantime I did look at quite a lot of graphs in manuals, TV, journals etc and quite a lot of them look completely different from the typical dot examples. I am sure with many massaging you could use dot to produce equal output, but from my POV dot looks like a tool from experts for experts - and most people editing/adding stuff to a wiki don't want to learn all the nitty-gritty details just to produce a 3-node pretty graph :)
I hereby asked the developers' community to consider the implementation of Victor Farina's graphviz extension [0] in all wikis.
[0] Proposed for all Wikipedias http://www.wickle.com/wikis/index.php/Graphviz_extension [1] http://www.graphviz.org/Gallery.php [2] http://www.graphviz.org/Documentation.php [3] http://www.graphviz.org/Documentation/dotguide.pdf a concise manual for starters [4] http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=graph+drawing&btnG=Suche&met...
I really DO think that it would be a good idea to deploy such an extension on a testwiki first and let people toy with it - preferable with both extensions. After a while problems and shortcomings will emerge.
Somehow I think that enabling the graphviz extension without any forethought or tests will end us up with a lot of (badly done) graphviz graphs.
Finally, I think some more discussions from people actually wanting to add graphs to wikis would be good. I know that I use graphs for some things like networkplans, flowcharts etc and I have some plans to add features that make support for these types of graphs more easily.
Hope that explains my POV a bit,
Tels
- -- Signed on Thu Mar 31 00:37:32 2005 with key 0x93B84C15. Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/ PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.
"Call me Justin, Justin Case."