[Bioperl-l] wiki

[Johann Visagie]

Jeff,

Jeffrey Chang on 2000-09-06 (Wed) at 00:37:33 -0700:
> 
> Are there tools that will take a Wiki and package it up in another format,
> such as printable HTML or LaTeX?

None of the Wiki clones that I know of allow anything like that.  Though the
original WikiWikiWeb has been around for yonks, the popularity of Wiki as a
medium has only taken of lately, and I suppose that none of the clones have
yet had the time to develop too much creature feep.  :-)

<aside type="off-topic">

I feel that structured documents of some sort are one of the prime
deliverables of any collaboration.  I'm chatting to some people who are keen
to develop an "online collaboration server" of sorts which may deliver many
of the advantages John Udell mentioned in the article that I quoted (though
we started talking before the article appeared).  Among the possible elements
of such a server that have been discussed are:
- a relatively bare-bones Wiki
- a more complex structure for collaborative documents
- a mailing list-cum-slashdot type object, but providing finer granularity
- the necessary infrastrucutre to allow transparent cross-referencing between
  various types of objects.

This is all pretty much still in the discussion phase, though.  :-)

Another project which may deliver the ability to construct more advanced
documents wiki-fashion would be WikiNG, which I also mentioned before.
WikiNG will probably used StructuredTextNG ("STX NG") as markup format.  As an
example, the Zope Book is being authored using STX NG, which is:

 "... transformed into a DOM object which is used to generate HTML (for the
  online content), DocBook [DTD] (for O'Reilly) and PDF (for online
  printing).  STX NG, including its DocBook and PDF capabilities, will be
  released in future versions of Zope once we wring all the bugs out of it,
  for now, it can be found on the 'StructuredText-Dev' CVS branch [of Zope]."

Links again:
Udell article:  http://software-carpentry.codesourcery.com/Groupware/report.html
WikiNG:  http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/WikiNG
STX NG:  http://www.zope.org/Members/jim/StructuredTextWiki/StructuredTextNG

Sorry for the long aside, but I'm becoming more and more interested in the
whole online collaboration problem, and more convinced I should be doing
something about it.  Now, if only I had the time...  :-)

</aside>

-- Johann