RE: [Axiom-developer] A possible "navigation" approach for Axiom "crystal"

[Bill Page]

Bertfried

Thank you for the reference to your Clifford wiki at

  http://clifford.physik.uni-konstanz.de/~fauser/

I think that it is an interesting tool to link to other
resources, but you do not seem to have very much content
in the wiki itself. Is this that your intention? Do you
find that many other people besides yourself make use of
the ability to edit your wiki pages?

On Saturday, April 17, 2004 5:12 PM you wrote:
> 
> Dear Bill, and Tim,
> 
> to set up a wiki is quite easy, you might find one on my 
> web-page concerned with the documentation of Clifford and 
> Bigebra.- My experience is however, that is take reasonable 
> time to reformat documents (eg the 500p documentation of 
> Clifford and Bigebra) into the format used by wikis.

I think automatic conversion is possible if you use wiki
tools such as latexwiki which is based on zwiki, and which
in turn is based on Zope. Simple Python scripts could do
most of the necessary reformatting from the original LaTeX.

> Wikis are optimized to serve a human to format text easily,
> so that virtually everyone can edit a page, without knowing
> any html (not to speak about LaTeX, or MathML) I do not see
> an easy automatical conversion.

Some people might claim that LaTeX is optimized to serve a
human to format mathematics easily. latexwiki trys to provide
both in one package. But I think MathML serves an entirely
different purpose. It is not optimized for use by humans,
rather it's purpose in communication between machines.

> This is also not the idea of a wiki, being automatically
> generated from unaccesiible (via the wiki interface) source,
> say directly from the axiom code. If I understand literate
> programming correctly, it should however approch the wiki
> idea somehow, to allow to document and change the pamphlet
> files over the web,

Yes, this is exactly what I would hope to achieve. I think
that initially the Axiom wiki could be loaded from the
existing pamphlet files and LaTeX documentation. But there
after it should be possible to maintain it all entirely
"through the web" including building a new binary Axiom
distribution. Perhaps for some purposes it would also be
desirable to extract everything from the wiki into the
conventional linear text format pamphlet files and
documentation.

> this might be restricted to documentation, not to spoil the
> code of the official release.

No, I would not want to limit the use of the wiki to only
documentation. There are other ways to control access and
to incorporate changes into an official release.

But loading the 1000+ pages of the existing Axiom documentation
into a latexwiki would be a sufficient challenge for me to
start with! I am not quite ready yet to take on that challenge
but maybe soon.

Regards,
Bill Page.