Colonising Web Sites of Wiki Pages with Ultra Lightweight Web Applications

Michael Rees, Associate Professor, School of Information Technology, Bond University, Qld 4229, Australia. Email: mrees@bond.edu.au

Keywords

Ajax, XML, JavaScript, single page application, ultra-lightweight web application, wiki, wiki interchange format.

Abstract

As an ultra lightweight web application DotWikIE (Rees, 2006) showed that a single web page, loaded directly from the local machine's filestore, could support a wiki application running within a web browser. This allows the web page to carry data content which can be used and manipulated by a browser on any machine without requiring an Internet connection. The single web page contains both the application logic and data respository for the wiki, is highly portable, and can easily copied for backup and deployment.

While DotWikiIE is useful a web-based wiki with the same functionality has the advantage of being accessible on any Internet-connected machine. DotWikIEWeb is the evolution of DotWikIE as an ultra lightweight web application that works either from the local filestore or from a web site. This paper presents the techological problems and discusses an implementation of DotWikIEWeb and its ability to become the single page seed of a colony of associated wiki pages. DotWikIEWeb retains the benefits of single page web applications while gaining the capability to operate on a web site.

Because of their flexibility wikis in general tend to become unstructured quickly as the user grasps the freedom to populate and format each wiki component in an ad hoc way. This is seen as one of the main advantages of a wiki. The paper concludes by discussing some approaches to how wikis could retain a more regular structure for their content.