Re: XML (was B-liner)

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 1985

Posted by sub
2004-06-28 03:23:41

[I’m interested to know how you would like the XML to work?]

The idea of combining an outliner with templates to structure information is very good; my main concern has to do with compatibility of the file format. I’ve grown tired of importing/exporting and losing formatting and structure along the way.

I think that XML is the way to go; therefore, I am responding to your question more generally here for the interest of others in the discussion group as well.

Ideally, I would like to be able to share information between various programs, others better suited to text (i.e. Brainstorm, various outliners) and others to graphical representations (i.e. FreeMind, ConceptDraw, Personal Brain). If all my knowledge management tools used XML as their native format, it would be quite simple to share information between them and take advantage of their individual strengths.

I have yet to find an outliner that uses XML as its native format, with the exception of Leo; this however is targetted to programmers and is not so well suited for other uses.

I think that the Ideaspad concept in structuring information is particularly well suited to XML; in that case, one could perhaps still use HTML for designing the data entry forms, since more people are acquainted with this, but the underlying data would be saved in XML.

I understand that changing the actual native file format of a program is complicated business; in the long term though, I think it is definitely worth investing in using the XML standard, especially since Office 2003 and Infopath have already paved the way.

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