1. The Introduction
  2. User Features
  3. Administration Features
  4. Ideas
  5. One very good thing (A note about lynx and vim)

Features of the web-editing system

The Introduction [toc]

This page is supposed to provide some information about currently supported features of the web-editing system.

User Features [toc]

  1. Automatic hyperlinking of URL type text in documents
  2. Support for different 'types' of documents, such as FAQs, journal, blog or diary style document, and normal information documents.
  3. Automatic creation of hyperlinked contents in an appropriate format for each type of document
  4. Ability to template documents with preprepared HTML
  5. creation of ordered and un-ordered lists
  6. Copying and renaming of server files
  7. Search for files on the server
  8. I believe quite friendly to text only browsers such as 'lynx' and 'links' and very easily usable in a entirely console environment, given a reasonable texteditor.

Administration Features [toc]

  1. Editing of any text file on the server, with a slightly configurable browser editor
  2. Removal of server directories into the 'trash' (not quite complete)
  3. Copying of server directories
  4. Creation of server directories
  5. Back-up of server directories into compressed files
  6. Easy switching between files and directories
  7. Automatic backing up of old versions of edited files
  8. Templating of application messages

Ideas [toc]

  • Transform references to buttons, as in 'the button labelled enter' into HTML button elements
  • Transform 'Note:' and 'Warning:' into red or italic text.

One very good thing (A note about lynx and vim) [toc]

I just discovered something which has really made me quite happy, although in someways it is fairly sad that this is the sort of thing that is making me happy these days. Basically the good thing which I have discovered is this;

If you like to use command lines interfaces and computer systems which dont have any graphical windowing system installed, not that you have anything against images, and also you have grown attached to certain very old programs that have grown up in the unix world and which seem to just get better and better the more that you know about- and I am refering to such venerable pieces of c language code such as the vim text editor, its vi ancestor, its ed great grandparent, the remarkable lynx text browser, and perhaps its 'links' variant, and such remarkable things as the sed stream editor, which itself was created with the quite interesting yacc and lex parser generators and so... then, if you made it through that subordinate clause, you will be happy like me, that if you set the editor of lynx to be vim, by pressing o and typing 'vim' in the appropriate spot, and if you press control-X e when you are in an HTML textarea then you will get to edit the text area contents in vim.

That is really quite special, and demonstrates one more time the power of non-monolithic programming. The best path is to find a way to and a format to link programs, such as the plain text encoding and the stream mechanism, and then write small good programs.

Now why I am happy about this is that it means that I can use the application which I wrote in php and which is at http://wagga-cwc.org.au/refurb/webpad/control.php to edit all the files contained there.

This file you are reading now was edited using this handy lynx / vim combination running on a redhat 9 box and doing normal http comunication with the php application running on a webserver somewhere or other.

I believe that my application in someways adheres to the unix spirit of small programs doing one thing well. It also obeys the principle of economy of usage of resources, of the use of the text encoding as the data exchange format ... etc. To further this diatribe, so many OO people talk about code-reuse and object reuse and 'leveraging' previous efforts and all that rubbish and right before their eyes is a system which does all of that in the most efficient way, and it is completely based on procedural processes and code, such as c and streams. And what is more, it was invented in the 1970s and still has not really been properly rediscovered although clearly linux is doing alot of good work in this direction.

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