The Butt Ugly Weblog

Blatant wiki-commercialism

Sorry for this advertisement break, but I'll have to plug the guys at Integral. They not only run a wiki as their intranet, it also serves as their public web site.

It not only looks nice, but it actually makes a lot of sense for a small company: You only really need a good template, and after that anyone in the company can easily update the public web site contents as well. You obviously have to close it from any non-company people, though.

I think this highlights something that has so far been neglected in this Wikis look ugly -discussion: What Wikis do is that they separate content from presentation; much like what Tex and LaTeX did originally. And this is a very, very powerful paradigm. It allows those people who can write content, think about the content, and only the content; and those who understand presentation, can think about the presentation.

Of course, most of the current Wikis do look ugly, no denying that. But this separation of form and function does exist in Wikis, much like it exists in WebLogs, or at least in the different weblogging platforms such as MovableType or Radio Userland.

The next logical step in the evolution path is to move to WYSIWYG-wikis, much like what happened with the transition from ~LaTeX to Word. I really, really do want a edit-in-place Wiki which has no separate edit mode. You just click anywhere on the text and type your stuff. I want to have a HydraWiki.

P.S. Of course, the fact they they are running JSPWiki has nothing to do with my enthusiasm. No sirree.

P.P.S. I had no idea JSPWiki could look so professional. :-)