ReducingImpedence

I'm collecting notes here.

(See the WikiNG proposal for related stuff.)

On 19 Mar 2001, Kent Polk wrote:

 > How much thought has been given to the possibility of implementing
 > an automated hyperlinking facility (WikiNames :^O ) to CMF object
 > collections???

I've given this some thought. I really want low-impedence link authoring, and also want the document-namespaces of conventional wiki and lineage (where documents are created from, and thereby offspring of, other documents) that zope.org ZWiki have innovated.

For StructuredText-style documents, i want to maintain a shortcut for referring to documents within the same collection by their name, but with a slight bit more explicit effort on the part of the writer to distingush such references. I'm calling these things "CommonNames?". They would have similar capitalization rules as WikiForNow? (like typical wiki, but allows numbers and "~" tildes), but:

• CommonNames? would have to be enclosed in square brackets to be recognized - "[CommonName]". No unintended WikiLinks? popping up in your text left and right.
• Stuff that doesn't qualify as a CommonName? does not turn into a link if it's enclosed in a square bracket so that you can use square brackets as you normally would for non-CommonName? text, ![without surprises].
• To turn arbitrary text into links with a shortcut gesture, you have to double the square brackets: [[this would be a link]] to a horribly named document.
• As a bonus, since the mechanism for recognizing CommonNames? in square brackets is so definite, we can apply a bit of discretion and map, eg, plurals to singulars - [CommonNames] would map to [CommonName] if CommonName? already exists as a page.

  (If no variant exists, the plural will be offered as the name for the new document - but the creation actions for CommonName?-style documents will offer editing of the name being used, so the creator can normalize to the singular, or whatever variant they prefer.)

One other aspect to this question is realization of "link objects" in zope. These link objects would know how to render themselves (or something would know how to render them) into many formats - XML, HTML, StructuredText, Word, whatever manifestations the documents could have. Further, they would be able to play nicely with Interlinking Info OrganizationObjects?, for, eg, indirection that could track forwarding of document locations as they are renamed and moved around the site. :

 > I mention this because almost every project possibility that I bump
 > up against has almost the same set of requested 'requirements'.
 > The good news is that I think we are gradually bumping off those
 > requirement items with the new core components of Zope/CMF, leaving
 > less for a developer to create. Some of the things that are left
 > are automated tree-views of document heirarchies arranged according
 > to query constraints (meta-data again...) and automated hyperlinking.

I think there will be some important common hierarchies, in addition to the folder hierarchy - lineage, keyword hierarchies (i need to get my notes concerning these online - my machine just had a disk crash, i hope they're still there!), and others.