Re: [LogiLogi-list] Some questions in reply to Charl's proposal...

Charl (one of the students from Nijmegen) created a proposal for
changing some things in the data-structure of Manta. It's on-line 
here, for those of us interested:

http://www.logilogi.org/pub/manta/req_diff_en_datastructuren.pdf

Charl is also on this list, so I will ask a few questions about it
here, so he and others might give their views on them.

General remarks:

* First of all: the proposal gives a clear description of the 
  current system, and contains an interesting proposal about 
  which I really would like to know more.
* An issue is though that I'd be interested in seeing some 
  benchmark-data. I suspect that not the saving and diffing of 
  the text, but the resolving of links will take most time in an 
  average-sized logi to which, say 4 new links were added...
* I wonder how much of that would disappear if we implemented the
  diff-algorithm in C++, or if we wait for YARV 
  (http://www.atdot.net/yarv/,
  http://www.antoniocangiano.com/articles/2007/02/19/ruby-implementations-shootout-ruby-vs-yarv-vs-jruby-vs-gardens-point-ruby-net-vs-rubinius-vs-cardinal)
  Ruby really seems to me to be the wrong language for pointer-
  juggling.

Links:

* A thing that should be taken care of is how the links will be
  resolved after one saves a logi as a new text. The current 
  procedure is to translate the link-positions to absolute space 
  and then look at which links changed, and re-resolve only those.
* For speed-reasons links must be pre-resolved (so we can have
  incoming links, and the link-drop-downs will load within reasonable
  time) what is your plan for this, especially as we don't want
  duplication of incoming links from different versions (I could
  imagine still using positions for links, but then we still will 
  have to apply the diff-algorithm).
* It should still be possible to link to specific versions after
  this change (but this would not be a problem, as we could add a
  version-column to the logi-table)

Tags:

* I really think that tags should be applied to logi's and not to
  versions. Semantically this makes more sense, as logis should be 
  short texts and be normally not editable by other authors they 
  are not expected to change that often and thus to remain fairly 
  stable at least semantically.
* Also it will keep some queries - like those for branches, but
  also link-resolving - faster (unless we would store old logis in 
  a separate table).
* This does not mean that keeping Logis separate from LogiVersions
  would mean that we cannot duplicate the body-text in LogiVersions
  instead of in Logis. That might still be a good idea.

Editing:

* I think that this proposal jumps over the problem of link-tags
  inside the text a bit too quickly. Many people in the humanities
  would not like to see link-tags inside their text. Especially
  link-tags because those really break into the text, contrary
  to '''emphasis''', or = titles =. 
* Having links in the text will even be a bigger problem in manta
  because other will be able to add links to your text even if they 
  cannot edit it, so some texts could become quite crowded with 
  links contrary to the wishes of the author.
* So we would really need a WYSIWYG-editor if links were to remain
  inside the text for all edit-modes.

This might seem a lot of questions and remarks, which is true ;)

But they are mainly aimed at getting the proposal, and the issues 
involved clarified... surely not at keeping status quo, or making
the proposed changes seem impossible...

greetings,

Wybo