Wiki Wiki Sand Box

Click on the edit text button at the very bottom of this page.

• You can see once you click on that button what a page looks like when you edit it. See note at the end of this page for where the HTML codes hide out.

• You will see plain text and a few simple Wiki editorial codes. For example, looking at the first line on this page in the editor, you see that three apostrophes or triple single quotes before and three more after a string cause the string to appear as bold.

• You can see on the next line that a string of five or so dashes

• By setting a string off with two apostrophes or double single quotes--one set before and the other after--the string will be presented in italics. If you can't type normal apostrophes, you can probably cut and paste them from somewhere else on the page.

   *  And that the asterisk becomes a bullet.  Except for preformatted text
      like this in which it, naturally, remains as an asterisk!

• You can see how the http and email links work. When the strings:

http://www.debruyn.com

mailto:jdebruyn@iex.net

Hmmm... I don't yet see any examples of embedded images like this:

After you are finished with the editor and your editorial handy work press Save at the top page above the box within which you do your editing. You will be flipped to the next page which is a thank you note from our sponsor, Ward Cunningham, and a list of the words that you misspelled.

In order to see the page as you have edited it you will need to use your back button at the top of your browser to go back two pages to view the page that you edited as others will see it. (Or you can just click on the handy link right after "Thank you for editing..." at the top of the page!)

When you get there you will be presented with the page as it was before you edited it. Press the reload button at the top of your browser to reload the page as you have edited it.

Good luck, JohnDeBruyn

P.S. You can see from JohnDeBruyn what happens when you run a couple of words together that have capital letters.

P.P.S. Click Find Page at the very foot of any page to get more of the hang of this Wiki thing.

Some other useful pages to look at are:

        * GoodStyle
        * TextFormattingRules

        * TextFormattingRegularExpressions

--KatyMulvey

Pretty neat, John,

I have a question.

Joe Mendicino, ALI-ABA

        *Can the editor deal with HTML coding?

<H2> is this bigger or what? </H2>

Ok nothing happens, but if you look at the source something did happen the < was converted to to an HTML code so that it would be displayed as an <

I discovered, in my exploration of the PPR site today, that HTML coding capability has been added to ThoughtsWeaver--a Wiki Wiki adaptation by JimCoplien for use at Bell Labs. He discusses this and other features of his Wiki Wiki adaptation in ThoughtsWeaverAdditions. Another of his ThoughtsWeaver additions is also discussed below in my exchange with John Helie about security.

JDB (may be JohnDeBruyn)

You also may take a look at JosWiki (also called WikiClone by its author, DaveHarris), a WikiClone used to support discussion of the Java OS project at http://www.jos.org/

The software is available at ftp://ftp.jos.org/pub/wiki.zip and templates are at ftp://ftp.jos.org/pub/exampletemplates.zip

It also includes (free) registration of users, to trace modifications. Another user, PeterThoeny, (see his page on JosWiki), added a regex search, and linked it to NT user admin (to avoid requesting registration for all internal users). His code is available at http://www.mindspring.com/~peterthoeny/twiki/

TWiki has many extensions to JosWiki, for details see TwikiClone and my web page indicated above.

-- PeterThoeny - 13 Nov 1998

Well I am here and playing around a bit, I guess it would become easy and eventually we could have a dialogue here.

John R. Helie

It also looks like I can fiddle around with others postings, I could wreak havoc out here. Security becomes a VERY interesting issue in negotiation spaces.

JRH

Hello John:

WardCunningham has had the Portland Pattern Repository--the site that we are using here with the user edit feature--up and OPEN on the Web for two plus years now with no infractions. This speaks well of the users and visitors who have strayed in here.

There are several Web-based discussion group programs that would facilitate straight message exchange where each message stands alone. The beauty of Wiki is in collaborative editing and an open, 3d-like structure for organizing the information.

I am hoping to experiment with this open environment and test the proposition that the academics, lawyers and other professionals that we are working with would be able to operate on the same high level as the software design and engineering community.

There is a feature in Ward's Wiki Wiki that permits a review of who added what to a particular page. I will need to look back at my notes of my discussion with Ward about security.

JimCoplien at Bell Labs has included another security feature in his adaptation of Wiki Wiki for collaboration with the others with whom he works at the labs. His adaptation, called ThoughtsWeaver, permits closing a page to editing by placing a security flag on it. This feature and others (like AppendOnly and <html>--JimCoplien) he implemented are discussed at ThoughtsWeaverAdditions.

He has opened a public site using ThoughtsWeaver on the topic of organizational patterns. This public site is aptly described by Jim as a fish bowl because his security adaptation has been fully implemented. There is a much more detailed discussion of this security on one of the pages at this site:

http://www.bell-labs.com/cgi-user/OrgPatterns/OrgPatterns?DifferencesFromWikiWiki

I have discussed with Ward and other users here the possibility of two levels of access:

1. Read and comment, which would permit a user to append a note on the end of a page but not edit the page. This would be like your comment and my reply here.

2. Read and edit, which would permit collaborative and open editing on the same basis that all of the users have here.

JDB

A different and controversial wiki security mechanism has recently been proposed. This is the WikiStoneSociety -- PeterMerel.

P.S. Another Wiki clone developed by Eric Huss is at: http://st-www.cs.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/wikic/wikic?WelcomeNewVisitors

Eric's Wiki adaptation has a convention for using a WordOrPhraseLink.

Another question:

        * Where is the beef, er HTML?

And then when the page is printed, that is displayed to the user who calls the page up to view it, these codes are converted and other HTML formatting codes are added on the fly just like the old fashioned word processor when you sent the page to the printer. This happens each time a page of text in the Wiki Wiki data base is called up by a user's browser. Any user can get a look at what has been done HTMLwise on the fly by using the view source feature on their browser. (These editorial codes, that do their magic and are not displayed to the user except when editing, are described above and in the other references that Katy mentions in her note two or three screens up from here.)

ThoughtsWeaver passes embedded HTML unchanged if the input line is escaped with a leading vertical bar (|). If the page starts with <html>, the whole page is passed un-Wiki-fied. ThoughtsWeaver also supports AppendOnly pages, ReadOnlyPages?, pages that can be written if a password is provided, and assorted combinations like password-protected append-only pages.

I don't like the way AppendOnly pages work--it's too easy for peently. I've thought of clumsy approaches, but am open to suggestions. -- JimCoplien

Perhaps this is too contrary to entire model of this system, but, with regards to how to correct the problems associated with AppendOnly, why not issue userids and passwords to such as system? --Jim Hebert

Jim has some very good points. I took the liberty of copying his question and moving the balance of his comments to the AppendOnly page where the rest of the thread on that subject is evolving. JDB

New visitors: If this is your first visit to Wiki Wiki Web and you got here without going through the front door of this site, please take a look around. This site is very well organized. Go to the FrontPage which was the intended starting point for new visitors.

So I want to know if RalphJohnson's [word or phrase link] works in this wiki... No, but check out the [1] format at WelcomeVisitors where WardCunningham explains the three routines for making links here at WikiWiki or you can take a look at how the [1] format works by clicking on [1] << here. The [1] format is fairly close to what RalphJohnson was doing with his [word or phrase link] JohnDeBruyn (8/7/97)

There is already a good model for AppendOnly pages. The Web Crossing engine, in use on the Mac the Knife message boards[2] allows users to edit or delete their own postings for 30 minutes after making them. Once the 30 minutes are up, the addition does become permanent. The drawback, of course, is that you have to be able to identify users...

-- RussellGold

        * Han Bakker, Utrecht, The Netherlands

An important aspect of WikiNature, in my opinion, is that authoring be easy and non-intrusive, especially for non-technical authors. Our experience has been that embedded HTML significantly degrades this aspect of Wiki.

I'm still of the opinion that a more structured, recursive view of the relationship between the "BrowsePage?" and the "EditPage?", such that the edit page is itself comprised of finer-grain substructure that can be modified within the WikiWeb (instead of through editing the underlying engine), would accomplish the same end in a more gentle way (for the author). I'm picturing something like the "edit card" mode of Hypercard.

-- TomStambaugh

Hello from another WikiWiki neophyte. This is certainly more fun than a Java sand box - as one can tamper with everybody else's toys as well as one's own right from the start.

The WikiWiki concept is close to a product idea that we have been playing with for two years on paper at Objective. The code name for the idea was Commentary.com. All I'll say is that you people are on the right lines !

It was back in 1991-92 that we also thought about another as-yet unimplemented product idea called Intentionality - tracking what KentBeck calls the stories and the engineering tasks of a project against the Smalltalk method and class editions implementing them within ENVY, with resultant automatic commenting of source, filterable according to the expertise or current focus of the reader. I wonder why we didn't finish that one either.

Thanks for the open invitation to take part in this wonderful, sprawling forum. And for giving me the best laugh from a software-related in-joke that I have had for a long time - from ResignPatterns.

-- RichardDrake