“the anti-wiki”
¶ by Rob FrieselFrom the “Wow, why didn’t I think of that?” department: The Tao of Mac explains “Yaki” (the “anti-wiki”):
…the content store is a folder tree. Each Wiki node is represented my a folder containing a plain UTF-8 text file, with metadata in a pseudo-RFC:2822 format:
[…]
I chose this approach because the file format is pretty damned eternal – there’s no shortage of libraries to handle RFC:2822 formats, the headers let me store pretty much whatever kind of metadata I want, and I can store “attachments” to the Wiki nodes in the folder alongside index.txt and reference them (in HTML) with a cid: schema – something that should be familiar to anyone who ever had to encode HTML inside MIME (I decided against a pure MIME, XHTML or XML format because any of them would be a right pain to edit directly).
While I’m still going through the article, I must admit that I’m fascinated by the simplicity of the approach. (Honestly/seriously: why not just use the filesystem?) I’ll also admit I liked the stab at Ajax: Considering that Ajax is prone to hammering your server with a gazillion spurious HTTP requests…
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