The Butt Ugly Weblog

--jcwinnie, 06-Sep-2003

I also personally have high respect for the SnipSnap folks, who are doing a lot of interesting work, but they don't seem to be very active in the blogging world.

--JanneJalkanen, 07-Sep-2003

Thanks for the comment. I'm going to spend some time looking at the 1.0 version of the api first. I'll probably do a reference implementation as a goof and see how the usage models really shake out.

My prejudice is that the design direction you're going with the api is too broad, including an "everything for everybody" approach. But until I've got some code down, I won't know for sure what does & doesn't make sense.

--Mad William Flint, 07-Sep-2003

I find this whole argument about standard Wiki APIs a non-issue (and more than a hint of "API Control Freak Syndrome", but let's not get into that...).

I too agree that SnipSnap is underrated and not as well-known as it should be (most likely due to their own lack of ability to "sell" their concept), but it has made quite an influence on my own efforts. You can get PhpWiki to look a lot like SnipSnap (which was where I started).

But let's get to the point: after customizing a Wiki engine for a while, you realize there is no real reason for Wikis to have a specific API - that's just added semantic cruft, since the ones we already have work just fine.

As I commented somewhere in Don's blog, you can add Trackback, XML-RPC, SOAP or TheLatestBleedingEdgeAPI (missing link on purpose) to any well-designed Wiki framework. My own PHPWiki-based weblog will soon have Trackback (I've been putting it off for a long while, since I found per-node referrers to be much easier and with perfect cross-engine compatibility) and I've been looking at the MetaWebLog API too for a while now - but have little actual use for it, since even my cellphone allows me to edit my Wiki...

--Rui Carmo, 07-Sep-2003

Well... Some things like determining back and forward links from the resulting HTML can be a bit of a hassle, especially if you don't know which format a particular wiki uses. So I believe there are issues that cannot be solved satisfactorily with bolting... err, creative use of the existing weblog APIs.

See an example in JSPWiki:TouchGraphWikiBrowser on how the API can be used effectively to visualize a Wiki.

Besides, it's not like it's an OR-question - JSPWiki offers both the WikiRPCInterface and the MetaWeblogAPI - you use whatever tool you need to get the job done.

--JanneJalkanen, 08-Sep-2003

Your welcome, Janne! :)

mahlen

--MahlenMorris, 13-Sep-2003