We all love wikis now. They are the preferred means of collaborating on documents, as they do not require sophisticated tools or knowledge,and you can do work on one just about anywhere there is Internet access. The drawback, of course, is that there is a plethora of wiki implementations and each has its own conventions, and though it takes a few minutes to figure out the basics, it takes longer to create wikis that look good. It’s also--and I guess this is more to the point--inelegant to have such a medley of difference.
Ideally, we could all agree on a standard set of basic conventions, and that would be good, but that only would satisfy one desire. I would still like to have the documents I create using OpenOffice.org, say, transportable (magically) to a wiki. Oh, I don’t mean complex presentations or spreadsheets; I mean fairly simple text documents--but with formatting. I can do a version of this now, by saving such as an HTML document, but why not just have “wiki” option instead? The file would be saved in a particular wiki format or even immediately posted to the desired target, as one can with blogs via our extension now. Logically, this could be an extension.
Of course, it would not give users a real collaborative tool--unless one could also engineer the extension to *read* wikis (all? or just some that comply with a putative standard?). Users could then edit asynchronously or concurrently, and collaboration would be that much more advanced.
So, here is the question: how difficult would it be to create such an extension for OOo? And think of the very useful results!
Ideally, we could all agree on a standard set of basic conventions, and that would be good, but that only would satisfy one desire. I would still like to have the documents I create using OpenOffice.org, say, transportable (magically) to a wiki. Oh, I don’t mean complex presentations or spreadsheets; I mean fairly simple text documents--but with formatting. I can do a version of this now, by saving such as an HTML document, but why not just have “wiki” option instead? The file would be saved in a particular wiki format or even immediately posted to the desired target, as one can with blogs via our extension now. Logically, this could be an extension.
Of course, it would not give users a real collaborative tool--unless one could also engineer the extension to *read* wikis (all? or just some that comply with a putative standard?). Users could then edit asynchronously or concurrently, and collaboration would be that much more advanced.
So, here is the question: how difficult would it be to create such an extension for OOo? And think of the very useful results!
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