From fbe9d95bf35d0e79a89e550172f7ae73b363b42d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jeremy Ruston Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2012 14:13:29 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] Docs updates --- readme.md | 2 +- tw5.com/tiddlers/HelloThere.tid | 2 +- tw5.com/tiddlers/History.tid | 10 ++++++++++ 3 files changed, 12 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/readme.md b/readme.md index 365fd7d55..bd131bf1a 100644 --- a/readme.md +++ b/readme.md @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@ -

Welcome to TiddlyWiki5

Welcome to TiddlyWiki5, a reboot of TiddlyWiki, the venerable, reusable non-linear personal web notebook first released in 2004. It is a complete interactive wiki that can run from a single HTML file in the browser or as a powerful node.js application.

TiddlyWiki offers a radically improved way of managing your data compared to traditional documents and emails. The fundamental idea is that information is more useful and reusable if we cut up into the smallest semantically meaningful chunks and use links, tags and macros to model the structured relationships between them. TiddlyWiki aims to provide a fluid interface for working with tiddlers, allowing them to be aggregated and composed into longer narratives.

TiddlyWiki5 is at an incomplete early alpha stage, and is not yet ready for general use. But it's the best possible time to get involved and support its future development. You can:

Usage

Architecture

Overview

The heart of TiddlyWiki can be seen as an extensible representation transformation engine. Given the text of a tiddler and its associated ContentType, the engine can produce a rendering of the tiddler in a new ContentType. Furthermore, it can efficiently selectively update the rendering to track any changes in the tiddler or its dependents.

The most important transformations are from text/x-tiddlywiki wikitext into text/html or text/plain but the engine is used throughout the system for other transformations, such as converting images for display in HTML, sanitising fragments of JavaScript, and processing CSS.

The key feature of wikitext is the ability to include one tiddler within another (usually referred to as transclusion). For example, one could have a tiddler called Disclaimer that contains the boilerplate of a legal disclaimer, and then include it within lots of different tiddlers with the macro call <<tiddler Disclaimer>>. This simple feature brings great power in terms of encapsulating and reusing content, and evolving a clean, usable implementation architecture to support it efficiently is a key objective of the TiddlyWiki5 design.

It turns out that the transclusion capability combined with the selective refreshing mechanism provides a good foundation for building TiddlyWiki's user interface itself. Consider, for example, the StoryMacro in its simplest form:

<<story story:MyStoryTiddler>>

The story macro looks for a list of tiddler titles in the tiddler MyStoryTiddler, and displays them in sequence. The subtle part is that subsequently, if MyStoryTiddler changes, the <<story>> macro is selectively re-rendered. So, to navigate to a new tiddler, code merely needs to add the name of the tiddler and a line break to the top of MyStoryTiddler:

var storyTiddler = store.getTiddler("MyStoryTiddler");
+
 Welcome to TiddlyWiki5
Welcome to TiddlyWiki5, a reboot of TiddlyWiki, the venerable, reusable non-linear personal web notebook first released in 2004. It is a complete interactive wiki that can run from a single HTML file in the browser or as a powerful node.js application.
TiddlyWiki offers a radically improved way of managing your data compared to traditional documents and emails. The fundamental idea is that information is more useful and reusable if we cut up into the smallest semantically meaningful chunks and use links, tags and macros to model the structured relationships between them.  TiddlyWiki aims to provide a fluid interface for working with tiddlers, allowing them to be aggregated and composed into longer narratives.
TiddlyWiki5 is at an incomplete early alpha stage, and is not yet ready for general use. But it's the best possible time to get involved and support its future development. You can:
 Usage
 Architecture
 Overview
The heart of TiddlyWiki can be seen as an extensible representation transformation engine. Given the text of a tiddler and its associated ContentType, the engine can produce a rendering of the tiddler in a new ContentType. Furthermore, it can efficiently selectively update the rendering to track any changes in the tiddler or its dependents.
The most important transformations are from text/x-tiddlywiki wikitext into text/html or text/plain but the engine is used throughout the system for other transformations, such as converting images for display in HTML, sanitising fragments of JavaScript, and processing CSS.
The key feature of wikitext is the ability to include one tiddler within another (usually referred to as transclusion). For example, one could have a tiddler called Disclaimer that contains the boilerplate of a legal disclaimer, and then include it within lots of different tiddlers with the macro call <<tiddler Disclaimer>>. This simple feature brings great power in terms of encapsulating and reusing content, and evolving a clean, usable implementation architecture to support it efficiently is a key objective of the TiddlyWiki5 design.
It turns out that the transclusion capability combined with the selective refreshing mechanism provides a good foundation for building TiddlyWiki's user interface itself. Consider, for example, the StoryMacro in its simplest form:
<<story story:MyStoryTiddler>>
The story macro looks for a list of tiddler titles in the tiddler MyStoryTiddler, and displays them in sequence. The subtle part is that subsequently, if MyStoryTiddler changes, the <<story>> macro is selectively re-rendered. So, to navigate to a new tiddler, code merely needs to add the name of the tiddler and a line break to the top of MyStoryTiddler:
var storyTiddler = store.getTiddler("MyStoryTiddler");
 store.addTiddler(new Tiddler(storyTiddler,{text: navigateTo + "\n" + storyTiddler.text}));
The mechanisms that allow all of this to work are fairly intricate. The sections below progressively build the key architectural concepts of TiddlyWiki5 in a way that should provide a good basis for exploring the code directly.
 Plugin Mechanism
Introduction
TiddlyWiki5 is based on a 500 line boot kernel that runs on node.js or in the browser, and everything else is plugins.
The kernel boots just enough of the TiddlyWiki environment to allow it to load tiddlers as plugins and execute them (a barebones tiddler class, a barebones wiki store class, some utilities etc.). Plugin modules are written like node.js modules; you can use require() to invoke sub components and to control load order.
There are several different types of plugins: parsers, serializers, deserializers, macros etc. It goes much further than you might expect. For example, individual tiddler fields are plugins, too: there's a plugin that knows how to handle the tags field, and another that knows how to handle the special behaviour of
 the modified and created fields.
Some plugins have further sub-plugins: the wikitext parser, for instance, accepts rules as individual plugins.
Plugins and Modules
In TiddlyWiki5, a plugin is a bundle of related tiddlers that are distributed together as a single unit. Plugins can include tiddlers which are JavaScript modules. 
The file core/boot.js is a barebones TiddlyWiki kernel that is just sufficient to load the core plugin modules and trigger a startup plugin module to load up the rest of the application.
The kernel includes:
  •  Eight short shared utility functions
  •  Three methods implementing the plugin module mechanism
  •  The $tw.Tiddler class (and three field definition plugins)
  •  The $tw.Wiki class (and three tiddler deserialization methods)
  •  Code for the browser to load tiddlers from the HTML DOM
  •  Code for the server to load tiddlers from the file system
Each module is an ordinary node.js-style module, using the require() function to access other modules and the exports global to return JavaScript values. The boot kernel smooths over the differences between node.js and the browser, allowing the same plugin modules to execute in both environments.
In the browser, core/boot.js is packed into a template HTML file that contains the following elements in order:
  •  Ordinary and shadow tiddlers, packed as HTML <DIV> elements
  •  core/bootprefix.js, containing a few lines to set up the plugin environment
  •  Plugin JavaScript modules, packed as HTML <SCRIPT> blocks
  •  core/boot.js, containing the boot kernel
On the server, core/boot.js is executed directly. It uses the node.js local file API to load plugins directly from the file system in the core/modules directory. The code loading is performed synchronously for brevity (and because the system is in any case inherently blocked until plugins are loaded).
The boot kernel sets up the $tw global variable that is used to store all the state data of the system.
Core 
The 'core' is the boot kernel plus the set of plugin modules that it loads. It contains plugins of the following types:
  •  tiddlerfield - defines the characteristics of tiddler fields of a particular name
  •  tiddlerdeserializer - methods to extract tiddlers from text representations or the DOM
  •  startup - functions to be called by the kernel after booting
  •  global - members of the $tw global
  •  config - values to be merged over the $tw.config global
  •  utils - general purpose utility functions residing in $tw.utils
  •  tiddlermethod - additional methods for the $tw.Tiddler class
  •  wikimethod - additional methods for the $tw.Wiki class
  •  treeutils - static utility methods for parser tree nodes 
  •  treenode - classes of parser tree nodes
  •  macro - macro definitions
  •  editor - interactive editors for different types of content
  •  parser - parsers for different types of content
  •  wikitextrule - individual rules for the wikitext parser
  •  command - individual commands for the $tw.Commander class
TiddlyWiki5 makes extensive use of JavaScript inheritance:
  •  Tree nodes defined in $:/core/treenodes/ all inherit from $:/core/treenodes/node.js
  •  Macros defined in $:/core/macros/ all inherit from $:/core/treenodes/macro.js
tiddlywiki.plugin files
 
This readme file was automatically generated by TiddlyWiki5
diff --git a/tw5.com/tiddlers/HelloThere.tid b/tw5.com/tiddlers/HelloThere.tid
index 99c961712..27f56c398 100644
--- a/tw5.com/tiddlers/HelloThere.tid
+++ b/tw5.com/tiddlers/HelloThere.tid
@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ modifier: JeremyRuston
 tags: introduction greetings
 type: text/x-tiddlywiki
 
-Welcome to TiddlyWiki5, a reboot of TiddlyWiki, the venerable, reusable non-linear personal web notebook first released in 2004. It is a complete interactive wiki that can run from a single HTML file in the browser or as a powerful [[node.js application|node.js]].
+Welcome to TiddlyWiki5, a reboot of TiddlyWiki, the venerable, reusable non-linear personal web notebook [[first released in 2004|History]]. It is a complete interactive wiki that can run from a single HTML file in the browser or as a powerful [[node.js application|node.js]].
 
 TiddlyWiki offers a radically improved way of managing your data compared to traditional documents and emails. The fundamental idea is that information is more useful and reusable if we cut up into the [[smallest semantically meaningful chunks|Tiddlers]] and use links, tags and macros to model the structured relationships between them.  TiddlyWiki aims to provide a fluid interface for working with tiddlers, allowing them to be aggregated and composed into longer narratives.
 
diff --git a/tw5.com/tiddlers/History.tid b/tw5.com/tiddlers/History.tid
index 77a6d897b..60d2e79b7 100644
--- a/tw5.com/tiddlers/History.tid
+++ b/tw5.com/tiddlers/History.tid
@@ -4,6 +4,8 @@ title: History
 
 Back in 1997 a colleague introduced me to [[Ward Cunningham's original wiki|http://c2.com/cgi/wiki]]. I was stunned that something so powerful could fit into just 700 lines of Perl, and fascinated by the radical reimagining of security and permissions. Like many other developers, I took every opportunity I could to try out various wikis, and to explore their use at work.
 
+The allure of the wiki for me was the feeling that this might be a paradigm that could eventually topple the prevailing hegemony of print-oriented documents and emails.
+
 After watching people use wikis for a few years, I noticed that power users made extensive use of the ability to open multiple wiki pages at once in several browser tabs, making it easier for them to compare and review pages, to copy text between them and to act as a sort of queue of pages yet to be read.
 
 I could see that this ability to manipulate multiple pages at once was central to the ability to refactor a wiki, and I've found that a wiki that is lovingly refactored tends to be more useful. And yet, standard wiki user interfaces have always been designed exclusively for the presentation and manipulation of single pages at once.
@@ -20,4 +22,12 @@ So, in September 2004 I released a primitive [[first version of TiddlyWiki|http:
 
 The downside of writing the first version of TiddlyWiki in this way was that it made it completely impractical to use for editing - when you click 'save changes' it just pops up a window showing the data that would be saved if it were possible for an HTML page to write to the file system.
 
+! Growth of TiddlyWiki
+
+! BT Acquisition
+
+! Osmosoft and TiddlySpace
+
+! Leaving BT
+
 //To be continued.../
\ No newline at end of file