I quite like Wikis, they're easy to install & use and good for allowing sharing of information across teams.
However these days I'd really like to just use some WYSIWYG HTML editors like Mozilla or MS FrontPage or whatever to edit the HTML content rather than having to use the cryptic Wiki-encodings.
For those uses who don't have a HTML editor you could always reuse the HTML editing widgets available in Mozilla and IE already.
Also editing WYSIWYG HTML is simple & easy and so you're more likely to get contributions from folks who haven't made the grok-wiki-encodings-leap. Plus I'd prefer the Wiki to be more file-based, allowing an easy way to work with folders and to arbitrary upload & edit of various kinds of documents too: xls, ppt, pngs etc.
So I've been musing about, what would it take to put together a simple WYSIWIKI. If you're on an intranet then I guess you could just use a file server I guess :). However I was wondering about using Subversion, since its a source control system, can do deltas & show differences, can register for changes to do republishing of new content and most importantly, its got a simple WebDAV interface so should work with all good HTML editors already.
Then to get a nice looking WYSIWYG all we'd need is a simple presentation mechanism (e.g. to style the vanilla HTML as a nice website, adding headers, footers & standard links) and a few nice extras like searching & recent changes reports and an RSS feed and so forth and we'd be all set with a full WYSIWIKI.
I wonder why noone's done this before?
Update: phew its not just me :). Costin agrees. A combined Wiki & Blog using existing tools (email or HTML editors or text editors with wiki-text) would be great.
11:21:12 AM
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