Re: Wiki seems to be near to collapse!

On 7 Apr 2009, at 14:56, Boris Motik wrote:

> Hello,
>
> In my opinion, as system that we had for OWL 1.1 worked rather  
> well. It
> consisted of two parts:
>
> - The spec was kept in SVN. People would check it in and out as  
> needed.
>
> - There as a script running somewhere that would check every couple  
> of minutes
> whether something was added to SVN and if so, it would publish the  
> new documents
> online. (I don't know whether the script was polling the SVN or  
> whether it got
> notified by SVN after a check-in.) Thus, a few minutes after a  
> change in the
> document, the change would become visible to everybody.

This is standardish at the W3C using CVS.

> This had really numerous advantages over the Wiki solution:
>
> - You could use whatever tool you wanted to edit the spec.
>
> - You could work off-line.
>
> - No performance penalty was incurred.
>
> - You did not need to create a new version of a document just to  
> see what your
> changes look like. (I know that Wiki has a "preview" feature, but  
> this often
> does not work correctly so I usually need to check in the new  
> version just to
> see what I've changed.)

Yep.

> The only downside I can think of is the lack of templates.

For many specs they used a home brew XML format with an XSLT so could  
have templates. This would be easy as a slight extension to HTML.

> Given how much of a
> pain the Wiki solution was, I would be happy to give that up in  
> exchange for a
> much more comfortable system.

+1

I found that it interrupted my flow a lot. And when trying to do  
fancy manipulations, whether for the end user (e.g., syntax  
switching) or for the author (e.g., references), it's rather a suck.

Cheers,
Bijan.