De-hoisting again reveals the full outline.
Hoisting an item hides all parent and sibling items thereby focusing, or zooming in, on a particular branch.Displaying selected levels (e.g., show all 1st and 2nd level items, but none deeper).Applying styles by outline level (e.g., bold all 1st level items).Viewing: The tool enables the user to affect the display by level.Every item entry must be within one level of its predecessor, such that each item must be a sibling or child of the preceding item (thus, no item can be a grandchild of the preceding item).Promoting, demoting, copying, or deleting a parent has the same effect on the children.Editing: Sound parent-child relationships are enforced when the user modifies the document structure.I’m working on business model for a commercial service, but I don’t know yet exactly what that would be.The principal attribute of outline editors is that they support or enforce the use of a hierarchy of their items. Also, dead links could be redirected to the wayback machine in perpetuity.
Dead links can be flagged and the # of dead links + update time can give a clue as to the value of the directory. Also, a posting or update time stamp should give a clue as to freshness, and link validators can automate the maintenance process to a large extent.
but that should be resolved as Dave suggest, by page rank, or hive-mind linkage. This raises some questions about link rot, quality of directories, etc. Unfortunately, it consists of things I bookmarked about 3 years ago, but it will serve as an example. I have made one of my folders public – it’s entitled ‘Search’. Until now, the ability to publish to the web site was not too interesting to me, but I can see that with some slight tweaks to the website we could have exactly what Dave has been evangelizing. I was so hooked that when went away, I went to the pain to set up my own server just so I could keep using it. Setting up a new machine and transferring bookmarks is a breeze. It synchronizes my bookmarks on my work, home, and laptop computers and allows me to access my bookmarks via the web if I am on another machine (kiosk, friends, etc.). I have been using BookmarkSync for about 3 yrs. Clients would be responsible for rendering linked directories. To link directories, you would just include a link to an XBEL URL, or an XBEL URL with optional XPATH to a sub dir.
XBEL is a well known format with an existing software base. The bookmark format is XBEL and is similar to OPML. The SyncIt software consists of a PHP/MySQL or ASP/MSSQL hosting website and C++ synchronizer client (BookmarkSync) that lives in the windows task bar. Due to a database server malfunction that wiped out all their accounts, the SyncIT folks have closed their doors and open sourced the software. I think Viswanath Gondi’s comment is dead on – it should be easy to bootstrap distributed directories in a viral manner using favorites. Most of the work is already done and it just became open source a few weeks ago. Thanks to Roland Tanglao for pointing this out. Update Of course somebody already did it! Check out. Fellow hackers, if you want a chance at fame and glory for relatively little effort, here’s your chance ? I realize now that this post would have been infinitely cooler if I’d simply coded up the app and given everyone a URL. Does this sound crazy enough that it just might work?
We could similarly lower the barrier to publishing by providing free hosting for all OPML files authored with the composer. Why not a web-based OPML composer? The interface won’t be nearly as interactive as a desktop tool, okay maybe we would if someone does a fancy java applet or DHTML thingee, but we’ll achieve goal #1 which is gettting more people to write OPML by lowering the barrier to entry for authors. We have web-based OPML readers and web-based OPML validators.
But not everybody wants to purchase and/or learn how to work in a desktop outliner (their loss). It’s much easier to compose OPML files in tools that support OPML, like this one. But not everybody wants to compose text in a text editor. That’s how I composed this file and this file. OPML is simple enough to write by hand in a text editor.