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A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

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Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#111

Post by chinpokomon »

mbrock wrote: post #98
shoover wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right on. I recently deployed a fedwiki farm for my team after playing with it myself and catching just a whiff of the possibilities. I had a litany of complaints myself, but was compelled to press on due to the intriguing promise of the goals of the project. While some issues stem from the fundamental design of tracking individual paragraphs, I believe many of the problems will be designed away with better client si…

Good to hear that someone else is interested! Could you explain a bit more about the issues with tracking paragraphs? It sounds like an interesting idea. From perusing the GitHub documents briefly, it seems like the architecture is such that other UIs should be possible. Do you have a hunch about the possibility of making, say, an Emacs client?

I started playing with it last night. It looks like the was a significant fork a few months back that separates the client from the server. Conceivably, you could take the client and figure out how to build a different UI.

Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#112

Post by chinpokomon »

peterwwillis wrote: post #100

What's important about this isn't the server or client, but the protocol. Like all peer to peer networks, all you need is a clear documenting of the protocol and anyone can create their own servers or clients. This way people concerned with SEO can expose the wiki's contents easier, and users can design a more attractive user interface, all while addressing the same content and sharing it the same way. If this works…

This is precisely my take. I wasn't familiar with SFW until last night (this post), but I've been playing around with this concept for awhile myself.

The only real drawback that I'm seeing so far is some link fragility. There are two countering forces at work here. You can take a link to someone else's content and mirror it back to your own SFW. If the source content changes and you don't take the "pull," your content is no longer relevant. This might mean for popular sources, lots of replicated copies of the source, but not always current. There is also a problem with the always available aspect. If someone is using content from another source, what do you do when the source goes down or just changes locations. At least with a non-federated wiki, the entire set of content goes offline together. That model is less prone to rot since it prunes entire branches and not just bits and pieces.

Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#113

Post by rayiner »

harryh wrote: post #106
rayiner wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's an interesting claim to make on a forum that frequently discusses new web technology I don't like to shy away from controversy. ;) > In 1998 there was no Gmail, no Github, no Slack, no Discourse, and so on and so on. No, but there was SMTP/IMAP/Exchange, which was better and didn't spy on you. There was ViewCVS, which was just peachy, and in any case the improvements in Github over CVS have to do with git ve…

The web is better now because there are more people using it. All the things that you dislike were requirements to onboarding all those people.

Fair enough, but I think increased usage is more the result of a confluence of more widely-available broadband (including mobile), as well as new applications that would've been possible without rich media. Garnish aside, Facebook and Twitter are slinging a few textual quips and images around.

Also, I'd quibble about the word "better." Does the vast increase in non-technical users make the world better? Sure. Does it make the web better?

Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#114

Post by vegedor »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #42
andybak wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want it recorded that this is dumb and unnecessary. But it's not that simple. Some uses of javascript genuinely add value - even to content sites. The real discussion is about cost vs benefit not "All interactivity is bad". Shades of grey, dear sir. Shades of grey...

But we do need some (I'd say, a lot) back-pressure against laziness and fashion that creates that unneccessary JavaScript. Being JS-heavy is something I found to be correlated with poor/untrustworthy content and someone trying to make money off you. I'm of course not talking about web applications here (like GMail or Google Docs) but web pages, which after all "should be text communicating a fucking message"[0]. [0]…

>correlated with poor/untrustworthy content and someone trying to make money >I'm of course not talking about web applications here (like GMail or Google Docs)

Why would you even disclaim that, if the implication wasn't justified, that Google services weren't trustworthy but trying to make money?

Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#115

Post by hnyc »

mbrock wrote: post #57
hnyc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because first impressions are important. If you see a car with a small knob for a steering wheel, you'll find that it is more difficult to use. And even though the engine of the car might be a radical improvement, this still doesn't mean that it can be used, mainly due to the pesky knob instead of a steering wheel. Obviously, after a while of using a knob to steer, you can get used to it, but that initial lack of usa…

I have some fundamental disagreements with "first impressions are important" when it comes to public software. First impressions are unreliable when it comes to understanding the value and potential of something that's in development. The whole wiki spirit is to release early, adapt to feedback, and encourage collaboration. When you say "it doesn't work" and "the innovation behind it is all for naught," I feel somewh…

I still stand by what I say that "first impressions are important". Perhaps they are less emphasized in public software, however, they still count for quite a lot (as is seen by reading the comments). Technically, your first impression was of the idea that it was trying to convey rather than the application itself that was linked to. To others, it was the application and not the idea.

I guess when I did say "it doesn't work" that was a bit judgemental, sorry. I meant that it was incomplete, or at least unintuitive and/or cluttered to use. In the version that was given to everybody to try out, that is.

First impressions may be unreliable, but it's how the world works, most of the time, and unfortunately changing human nature is quite difficult (although I haven't really tried :P).

Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#116

Post by SwellJoe »

shoover wrote: post #96
SwellJoe wrote: post #4

I believe the wiki is among the most amazing things to come out of the web (and think Cunningham is a genius for inventing it, or discovering it, or whatever process made it happen), and I can't count the number of times I've lost an hour or two spelunking into the C2 wiki. But, I'm having a hard time making sense of this UI. The panels popping up seemingly infinitely into the right side of the screen (every click ma…

These are all UI complaints and all fixable by anyone with a better idea and JS chops whether Ward likes the particular changes or not.

Yes, I believe the UI is the biggest failing, though I am also not seeing a clarity of vision, which wiki very clearly had (making it absurdly easy to create hypertext documentation for anything). Federated wiki seems to be about "federation", or individual wikis that can link amongst each other as readily as one can link between documents in a single wiki. That's a great idea. Federation may be the only thing that can save us from the walled garden age of Facebook, Google+, Github, etc. (or maybe it can't...the UI is gonna have to be better than this if it is).

So, I agree that it's biggest problem is UI (and that's what I listed above as being wholly wrong about this thing), but I think it's dangerous to underestimate how much design determines the impact of an idea. I've seen lots of really cool ideas come and go, with bad design as the reason it never takes off. And, it's probably a bad idea to underestimate how hard it can be to fix a bad design, if the design is intimately tied to the implementation. I don't know if that's the case here, though there's certainly a lot of bad design ideas that seem to be important to the developers; at least, they must be important to the developers because they made them flash incessantly.

I've poked around some more since posting my initial comment, and I really can't get over how very distracting those flashing icons are, and can't imagine how anyone on the team is OK with it. How can designers of a content system (which a wiki is, at its core) do so much to make the content seem like the least important thing on the page? The user is literally directed to pay attention to everything but the content.

Again, I say all of this with an incredible amount of respect for Ward and the wiki. But, this thing is a mess.

Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#118

Post by shoover »

SwellJoe wrote: post #116
shoover wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all UI complaints and all fixable by anyone with a better idea and JS chops whether Ward likes the particular changes or not.

Yes, I believe the UI is the biggest failing, though I am also not seeing a clarity of vision, which wiki very clearly had (making it absurdly easy to create hypertext documentation for anything). Federated wiki seems to be about "federation", or individual wikis that can link amongst each other as readily as one can link between documents in a single wiki. That's a great idea. Federation may be the only thing that c…

You make good points. I guess I'm more hopeful that the UI is fungible if the core ideas shine through.

I'll be most interested to see if they figure out a way to make federation easier to understand and use. At first I thought I wanted a globally editable central wiki with some company stuff and links out to individual wikis for project notes, developer knowledge base, and journals. It took a while for it to sink in that only the owner could edit the first one and really everyone needs their own to do anything. It's really hard to shift the mindset from shared state to single owner and fork to like, fork to change.

Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#119

Post by blueskin_ »

ogig wrote: post #66
kephra wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets look, how this new wiki behaves without JS, from the viewpoint of a search engine. e.g. compare http://c2.fed.wiki.org/methodology-subsets.html with and without javascript. The new wiki is doomed by design, because content can not be found by Google or any other search engine. And a wiki where the content can not be found is for the trashcan.

This can be solved using any of these methods: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/... I maintain a client side rendered website and while SEO can be problematic it can also be done. I don't see C2 using any of these methods at first glance tho.

It can more easily be solved by just not crawling sites that have mandatory javascript, because chances are their content is going to be crap and not worth the time if they are that hostile to basic usability.

Re: A complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application

#120

Post by edwintorok »

notthemessiah wrote: post #29
edwintorok wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the switch complete yet though? The new wiki seems to have almost no content...

http://c2.fed.wiki.org/migrating-wiki.html You might have forgotton how to use a wiki: you create pages that haven't been written yet.

Actually it looks like that the pages themselves just take a long time to load: for example clicking on 'extreme programming' shows the title 'extreme programming' and a blank page. Initially I assumed there is no content, but if I wait 5-10s then the content will be shown. This is very confusing: why show the title and empty page while loading the body?
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