Sorry for the crosspost but I wanted to reach a relatively large
audience with this post. There's an issue on which I need some
feedback.
Since very early on the TiddlyWiki (Classic)-hosting aspects of
TiddlyWeb[1] have been maintained in a project called tiddlywebwiki[2].
This provides a variety of features beyond the standard TiddlyWeb HTTP
API[3], but the two main ones are:
* Retrieving a collection of tiddlers stored on the server as a
TiddlyWiki with the tiddlers embedded therein.
* Retrieving a tiddlywikitext tiddler over the web rendered into HTML, or
a collection of tiddlywikitext tiddlers rendered into HTML in an
Atom feed.
By default this second feature, the server-side rendering of text
into HTML, is driven by an external package called WikklyText. This
package is no longer being maintained and has some issues:
* It is not compliant with modern packaging rules which cause
installation difficulties for tiddlywebwiki and tiddlyspace[4].
* WikklyText does lots of things, not just parsing and rendering
tiddlywikitext, making it quite large and complex, thus:
* Repackaging just the parts we need is challenging[5].
* Including it in the TiddlyWeb ecosystem's slow migration to
working with Python 3 is unlikely.
* I'm not certain but I think the fact the code is GPL makes
incorporating it wholesale into the tiddlywebwiki codebase awkward. I
reckon the author would be willing to make special dispensation, but
see above and "large and complex". It would be icky, not just
aesthetically.
I feel this leaves us with a few different options:
1. Do nothing. Just let people installed tiddlywebwiki using the
incantation described in [4]. I've already updated some of the
documentation to reflects, since that's the only way to get the
currently released code working. Pros: Nothing to do. Cons:
Installation would require some rather scary looking special
arguments that might put people off; No progress on making
tiddlywebwiki ready for Python 3.
2. Remove dependency on wikklytext. Pros: Easy to do. Cons:
server-side rendering of tiddlywikitext would be gone. In its place
the tiddlers would show up as plain text (on HTML and Atom requests,
they would still be rendered inside TiddlyWiki itself).
3. Someone else does the refactoring/porting of wikklytext to make
it useful for tiddlywebwiki. Pros: It gets done and its not me.
Cons: Over the history of TiddlyWeb there have only ever been a very
small number of contributors, so I'm not sure where this person
would come from[6].
I'd appreciate some input on what people would like to have happen. Do
you need or care about server-side rendering of tiddlywikitext?
Some important context when thinking about these issues:
* tiddlywikitext to HTML rendering can also be provided by
twikifier[7]. It is what's used on http://tiddlyspace.com and is
in use on my experiments with Tank[8]. It's nodejs though, so
requires additional infrastructure and experience.
* The tiddlywebwiki package itself is becoming rather legacy so may
not be the best site for a lot of effort:
TW5 is the long term future of TiddlyWiki and is being developed with
built in support for talking with TiddlyWeb.
At the same time it's becoming clear that the style of TiddlyWiki
generation used in tiddlywebwiki is probably not the best way to
work with tiddlers. In Tank[8] the process is to load an empty
tiddlywiki (from cache), load a bootstrapping bit of javascript
(also from cache) that loads in the tiddlers associated with the
wiki, activing plugins, themes, etc as needed.
The default option as this stage, barring convincing feedback in
some other direction, is 2.
Please let me know your thoughts. If you have questions please do
not hesitate to ask.
Thanks!
[1] http://tiddlyweb.com
[2] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/tiddlywebwiki
[3] http://tiddlyweb.tiddlyspace.com/HTTP%20API
[4] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/tiddlyspace/YCV2xbNclvM/cyrOlsbY7KsJ
[5] I made a go at this this morning. I made some small progress but the
resulting code was a terrible mess and on occasion entered an
endless loop. I think it would take me several days to get it working
properly and I don't really have the time, unless someone wanted to
sponsor me working those days?
[6] It would, however, be a very good learning project for anyone
interested in lexers, parsers, HTML generation and such things.
[7] https://www.npmjs.org/package/twikifier
[8] https://tank.peermore.com This is my next iteration of shared
tiddlyweb hosting. See https://tank.peermore.com/tanks/docs/Features
--
Chris Dent http://burningchrome.com/
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