editing documents in a wiki

"Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com> writes:
> 
> From: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>
> Subject: Postponed agenda items
> Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 07:53:05 -0400
> 
> [...]
> 
> > Should we edit the documents inside the wiki? (html, or wiki markup?)
> > 
> > -Alan
> 
> Well, I'm still not completely sure whether the wiki will support full
> HTML, and how easy it is to edit significant documents within the WIKI.
> (All I know about editing within a WIKI is that I'm sure not going to do
> it by using Firefox editing.)
> 
> If I can't easily extract the contents of a document section, move it to
> another editor (EMACS), edit it there, and then update the document
> section,

Step 1: install the firefox extension "It's All Text":
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125

There are also command-line tools for wiki download/upload, but I
haven't tried them.

> then I'm casting a very firm vote against having our documents
> in the WIKI.   Note that the round-trip has to be able to produce
> wrapped lines for editing and then not produce diffs related to this
> wrapping, unwrapping, or re-wrapping, or any artifacts of the wrapping.

Is your concern here:
    - you don't want some tool messing up where you-as-editor
      put the line-ends?   The wiki shouldn't be a problem here.
or  
    - you want people to be able to see the changes for what they really
      are, not the changes in line-end placement caused by emacs flowing
      text?  The wiki diff tool sucks (IMHO), but there are external
      HTML diff tools we can use.

> I also need to be able to produce off-line versions of the document
> easily and faithfully.

Yes, I'm working on reimpleming the tool RIF has been using to produce
TRs from the wiki.   Basic features:

      - change style from wiki style to W3C TR-style (pubrules
        compliant)
      - combine multiple wiki pages into on TR (maybe not necessary,
        given mediawiki's SectionEdit feature)
      - works on old versions -- the wiki has the document history,
        so one should be able to extract the TR as of some date.

One other big feature of mediawiki is that it has templates (ie macros).
It's been a while since I'd worked in a text-processing language that
had them, and I'd forgotten how useful they are in handling redundant
parts of the document, like tables.

Will that do what you want?

     -- Sandro

Received on Monday, 22 October 2007 15:13:45 UTC