TiddlyWiki5

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Revision as of 21:03, 22 November 2011 by Infomaniac (talk | contribs) (Sites: stale or dead project?)
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See also

A complete re-write of TiddlyWiki by the original inventor of TiddlyWiki. I surmised from the '5' that it has something to do with w:HTML5, and it does, but promises to be so much more:

Quote.pnga pre-prototype that will eventually become a modernised non-linear inter-personal web notebook. Right now this is not in a remotely usable state.

Focus

Quote.pngI've focussed on the things missing or broken in the original TiddlyWiki, and not paid too much attention to areas that don't need to change much. So, it's not currently structured as a single file, nor is it capable of saving changes. However, it does demonstrate some key new features and capabilities. There are three areas I'd like to focus on:
Embracing HTML By default
tiddlers are stored and edited as HTML. This means that you get a proper WYSIWYG editor, and that when Google looks at a TiddlyWiki5 file it will also see the content properly. It's been clear for a long time that wikitext is both a strength and a weakness of classic TW, it gives users great power, but it's incredibly off-putting for people who expect to type ctrl-B for bold. My goal in bringing WYSIWYG to TiddlyWiki is to maintain the ability to type macros and formatting directly, without going into weird sub-dialogs. This is because I believe that the real power of wikis is the way that they elevate linking to becoming part of the punctuation, and hence the writing process, instead of an operation performed afterwards. Anyhow, it's not all implemented yet, but in edit mode macros are represented as special "proxy" visual objects that can have custom interactions, but can be selected/copied/pasted just as if they were a single character of text.
Graphics as First Class Citizen 
Both bitmap and vector graphics are now a first class citizen, with image tiddlers embedded directly in the TiddlyWiki file, even in IE6. There's support for SVG vector graphics (with a plan to cross-render to VML for IE support). The idea is to be able to associate icons with tiddlers (and hence tags), and use the icons to represent those tiddlers in the UI.
Cleaning up 
But the real benefit is that the design is now much smoother top to bottom. TiddlyWiki originally evolved in fits and starts, and bears the scar tissues of me learning JavaScript as I went. In TiddlyWiki5, for instance, almost everything is a macro, including tiddler containers (aka a TiddlyWiki "story"), and tiddler frames. It uses jQuery and jQuery UI properly, leading to much more concise and clear code. It properly matches the capabilities of TiddlyWeb, with revision history retained for each tiddler and support for different MIME-types.
I should say that although TiddlyWiki5 will break backwards compatibility, there will be a migration path for existing TiddlyWiki content. Firstly, it will support the existing TiddlyWiki wikifier, so people can continue to use and edit tiddlers in wikitext if they want to. Secondly, you will be able to perform a one-way upgrade of your tiddlers from wikitext to html format. There'll be no going back at that point, but in exchange you'll be able to use the WYSIWYG editor.

Planned improvements over the original TiddlyWiki

I have bold-highlighted items that I believe are most important; the importance of others may have escaped me.--Infomaniac 13:59, 21 November 2011 (PST):

  • Rich text editing, with toolbars and shortcuts (and hence native html and not wikitext)
  • Graphics (SVG and image) as a first class citizen
  • Richer tiddler model with revisions, mime types and integrated skinny tiddlers
  • Social features that federate between servers and static files:
    • #tag
    • @user for referencing other users' activity streams based on following users and tags
    • impossibility of spam
  • Microkernel architecture with integrated source code browsing and editing, with syntax colouring and hyperlinks
  • Wide screen hungry, but concertinas[1] to an iPhone
  • Optimised for HTML5 browsers like Firefox 3, Safari 4, Chrome 2, Opera 10
  • Support for content stored in multiple locations/formats within the HTML file, including script tags, title tag, special comments (for MHTML), <div>'s like classic TiddlyWiki
  • New architecture for encoding options as cookies or tiddlers or via custom handlers

Sites

See also