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The outlining newcomers
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Posted by satis
May 13, 2021 at 03:55 PM
Dave Winer, who probably coded the first PC outliners in the 80s, is trying to wrap his head around the new outliners in the market, and has some interesting thoughts in his blog.
Most recently he’s discussed the use of double-square-brackets, and sharing, and outline-blogging:
“There are also big differences in the way our outliners work. I could explain that in a podcast, but don’t have the time to write it up now. The takeaway is that without open modular connections between the components via APIs, this new burst of outlineism will end up with a sad story of silos, not a wonderful explosion like the earlier open platforms. One silo vs a thriving ecosystem—either approach could win. It’s happened both ways in the past. We have to be careful to learn from past mistakes in evolving open platforms.”
http://scripting.com/2021/05/13/124723.html
(Dave is also a bit of a grouch, and often has to revise his opinions [a good thing!] and tends to dismiss siloed apps that export and import to multiple formats. Still, an interesting read, and blog.)
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
May 13, 2021 at 06:39 PM
I know I am not the only one who remembers that Dave was the original host of this forum, the one who got this ball rolling. I’m not sure of what he’d make of CRIMPing, and I don’t think I want to find out.
Posted by Franz Grieser
May 13, 2021 at 08:33 PM
Dave Winer wrote
>this new burst of outlineism will end up with a sad
>story of silos, not a wonderful explosion like the earlier open
>platforms.
Well, there are more and more tools that support markdown. And there are Obsidian, Notebooks app and others that read and write MD files in the file system, Obsidian even supports links between files.
That seems a good way to avoid being trapped in a silo.
Posted by Luhmann
May 14, 2021 at 12:12 AM
There is a necessary tension between experimentation and compatibility. If we had to agree to standards before creating each new app there would be no room for experimentation, but endless experimentation makes it hard to ever stop and develop standards. Look at how many different versions of Markdown there are and how many apps adapt Markdown in ways that make it slightly incompatible with other versions. At the same time, most of these apps all support some kind of plain text output, and it is possible to write scripts to “translate” the unique codes used in other apps. For instance, Obsidian does a decent enough job of translating Roam’s markdown output into its own, though some stuff gets lost in the process. (Right now Roam supports nested titles like [[[[apple]]pie]] while Obsidian does not.) My feeling is that this is “good enough.” Even though some workflows might be broken, it is all plain text and you can search and find stuff. In some ways, the power of modern search has made it less necessary to rely on standards. I think of the difference between the old Yahoo! search engine where everything was cataloged in a nested hierarchy and the modern Google search engine (or Spotlight on the Mac) where you can just find stuff even if it was filed away in the wrong place…
Posted by Dr Andus
May 14, 2021 at 12:33 AM
Sometimes ideas just get translated into another medium.
And the fact that it was possible to translate them perhaps means that there are no silos.
I haven’t tried Obsidian, so I can’t comment on it, but Roam to me is essentially an online version of ConnectedText, a personal wiki, which itself was a translation of online wiki standards.
ConnectedText only worked on one PC at a time (it was possible to work across Dropbox but it could get messy, so I never went down that route).
A Roam account on the other hand allows you to have multiple instances and you can easily switch from machine to machine and one platform to another.
To me that is progress.
And as Franz said, the openness is there in terms of using conventions such as Markdown and even wiki links.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding Winer’s point. I liked OPML, but ultimately anything can become a standard, even something of very poor quality, if enough people adopt it (such as QWERTY).
So if Roam becomes a runaway success and everyone in the world will be using it, or a clone of it, well, it will set the standard, it won’t be a silo.