s l a m

Updated: 10/21/02; 12:20:57 AM.

activeRenderer vs 1.2.1 Released

Features OPML inclusion - a step towards transclusion

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Wednesday, May 29, 2002

Outline Survey First Results
Here are the first results of the small outline survey I started on May 7th.
My first goal in the survey was to find out how many current s l a m readers were interested in outlines. Well, the answer so far is 23, the number of email reports I have received from the survey server.
This is about what I expected, considering I have in my estimation around 20 regular readers subscribed to s l a m's main rss feed (I know this from looking regularly at my referers page).
You may say the current results, if meaningful at all, are certainly more qualitative than quantitative :-)
My second goal was to determine how many of these readers were 'heavy' outliners. That's why the survey's second question is phrased a bit quizzically. The answer is about half, as demonstrated by the graph below:
When reading an outline and clicking on a link to another outline available on the Web, transclusion is the ability to have it expand in place, its nodes becoming part of the current outline, thus preserving context.
My third goal was to find out how many readers where interested in outline sharing. Well, apparently an overwhelming majority :
This should be music to Paolo's ears.
My last goal was to poll readers for interesting ideas to put into outliners and outline renderers. Publishing the detailed results would be too long, but here are the main trends :
Formating control : you want to decide on the style and color of the rendered text, based on node level, as well as newness and author for shared outlines.
Access control: you want to define read/write abilities when accessing a shared outline, based on user identification and possibly groups of users.
Revision control: You hint to date-stamped multiple versions of a shared outline, so that the elaboration process of the document is kept accessible from the final version.
Non textual content: you want to include pictures in outlines, and possibly other types of attachments (speadsheets)
Multi-platform: You want a truly - read unix/linux - multi-platform outliner, both to read and modify outlines.
My current project is just about outline rendering. I'm almost finished - still need transclusion - and then I'll move on to more sysadmin related topics.
But I'll help anybody whishing to move forward towards a fully modifiable - shareable - browser based - outliner, the only answer to all those requests imo.

9:43:39 AM comments: Google It!