Hello! On Wed, 23 May 2001, Chris Withers wrote:
Wouldn't a good place to start discussions and collaborations be a fishbowl project? Just a thought.
I have to be honest and say I find Wiki's next to useless for this kind of discussion, since I don't get prodded when new bits of discussion arrive.
I, personnaly, just hate web-based collaboration. Cameron Laird and few other people suggested me to try ZWiki. I tried. Now I hate web collaboration even more :) Let me count pros and cons of web-based collaboration against e-mail: 1. Web is "pull technology". You need to download the entire page. How many times do I need to read and reread messages on http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/ExtendedDTMLSorting - just to see noone added new comment? Isn't it just a waste of traffic? On the other hand, e-mail is "push technology" - if someone replied I guaranteed to get the reply right into my mailbox. And the reply usually carries not too big amount of quoting. What web makes good is summarizing. With e-mail, one needs to summarize and publish the summary explicitly. 2. Editing text is certainly weak point of the web. It is plainly nightmare to edit text in those small <textarea>s that loose all decent editing features. With e-mail, I can use whatever editor I prefer. And think about crashing. Crashes are oftne, especially in the world of that "Blue Screen of Death" OS. But even on the more stable OSes browsers crash often. And after the crash I have to go back to that page, redownload it, and start my text from the very beginning. With e-mail and good editor, even after crash (that are very seldom, BTW), I can just restore my editing session and continue. I certainly missed many points. I'd be glad if anyone says his/her words in favor (or agains) web or email-based collaboration. Oleg. ---- Oleg Broytmann http://www.zope.org/Members/phd/ phd@phd.pp.ru Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.