Wiki Hacking

• I used Ducky's automagic search expression to redefine the index page for all my notes.
• I'm playing with putting an RSS feed on my Notes page

More on Portable/Public Addresses

A public address � one that is visible outside Chandler, also called portable address.

We've been trying to sort this out.

See yesterday's notes as well on this which has a short list of uses cases.

I have the idea that there are structures in the repository, enabled by a "collections of collections" data model feature which are used to generate a name space such that there is an isomorphism between the two.

This gives the engineering flexibility to have as many name spaces as we need, but leaves open the design issues of which we should have and why. We need to further develop the use cases to drive requirements.

There are generic reasons to expose content in a tree of containers in that it provides a deterministic way of exploring the space (either by person or machine). If the contents of the containers have an implied semantics embodied by how the tree of containers was constructed, e.g., calendar events here, mail there, and so on, it allows a human exploring the space to use "hints" given by the tree structure to make the exploration more tractable.

Consider the wiki. There are two separate page linking structures, a tree in which every page in the wiki has a parent (except the root), and a graph of which pages are linked to other pages. The navigational affordances for walking the tree are not good, but if they were, it would be quite useful. This also argues for the utility of both tree and graph linkage.

In Chandler-to-Chandler interactions (remote browsing, exploration of a "space" of shared documents, the addresses will be hidden, so the form of the address is an engineering matter, not a design matter.

In Chandler-to-non-Chandler interactions, addresses will not be hidden, so their form matters. However, for a known genre of CtnC^? interaction, we could do special things in Chandler (e.g. acting as an application server to generate prettier HTML to serve up to a web browser accessing the repository).

Brian points out there are additional questions which need design guidance. He will write these up, but probably not until after he returns from vacation a week from Monday.

How are names created? What is the scheme for machine-generated names? To what extent can a user rename these?

Can an item have more than one address? Yes, absolutely, just as it can be a member of more than one collection.

Are addresses permanent? At least some of them are. These need further thought.

See also PagesAboutAddressing^?

-- MitchKapor - 22 Apr 2004