Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Manila and the "leading edge in Frontier development"

Author:Raymond Yee
Posted:9/16/2000; 4:52:12 PM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 9/16/2000
Msg #:21408 (In response to 21403)
Prev/Next:21407 / 21409

Dave, I'm pleased to see that you don't see Manila as a finished work and that an RFC for Manila is under way. At the risk of sounding pushy, let me ask when might we expect to see it.

IMHO, opening up plug-ins to allow developers as much control as possible would be an excellent direction to take. Obviously, there's no way for Userland to build Manila out-of-the-box to do everything one would want to do with it. Nevertheless, there are ways in which the core of Manila can be improved without necessitating a plug-in -- and that would be an area about which many Manila users would have somethings to say.

Knowing how we can offer constructive input in that area and being able to see whether the ideas are being incorporated would go a long way to building a community of Manila developers and users. Right now, it's unclear to me how to offer such input and know that it's being taken seriously: post in Manila-newbies? on the Frontier-Users? do it yourself by rewriting Manila?

I now appreciate that work on Radio Userland furthers your work on Manila -- but it certainly wasn't at all obvious to me that this was so when you first announced RU. (I kept wondering what music had to do with Manila. I now think of RU as a platform closer to the client-end that lets end-users manipulate and exchange XML data with song lists being a first (and currently) primary example. I'm likely to be incorrect here since I'm still learning about RU.)

About how nice it is to edit a Manila site (or weblog) in an outline: you don't have to convince me. I'm a die-hard fan/user of Ecco that is dabbling with how to shoehorn XML, XML-RPC, etc into Ecco so that I can edit my Manila site with this PIM/Outliner. However, as much as a small number of people love outliners, I'm not convinced that many people I hope to convince to write for the web would take to outliners -- just my hunch at this point. If they don't like outliners, then what? (I've started to think about trying to wire up MS-Word or XMetal 2.0 to speak XML-RPC so that users of those products can edit Manila sites. Does anyone know of work in that area?)

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