Re: [Fle3-dev] Rethinking Knowledege Building

[Tarmo Toikkanen]

> (1) Relocate the "select knowledge type drop down menu + reply button" 
> outside the note background colour and change the naming of the button 
> to be "add note".

As you said, this is a quick patch. If we want this for 1.4 (non-beta)
due in two weeks, we should do it now, before vocabulary freeze steps
in (I haven't mailed the translators yet). So quick decisions, please.

> (2) Make it possible to create links between several notes. Actually 
> this is an old idea.

If we could come up with the UI for this, we could also use it to
allow users to draw up their own connections between notes, which
would allow for more efficient reflection and note grouping. So there
is a lot to gain here, but as you pointed out, doing this with pure
HTML may be unusable (from the users' usability point of view). So
SVG, Java, Flash anyone?

I've done some patches on Touchgraph, which is a free Java based
applet/application for viewing and manipulating self-adjusting graphs
(networks). It could be extended to become a working user interface,
but I'm not sure we want to force users to be Java-enabled. So maybe
we still need a pure HTML user interface as well.

One idea was that when you start to write a note, it's always a
descendant to the currently viewed note, but that during note editing
you could select another note to link to. This would work like this:
1. Select "Reply" (or "Add note")
2. Write the note.
3. You come up with some other ideas related to another note. You press
   "Link to another note" (working title)
4. The user interface presents you with a list of notes and you select
   one.
5. You return to editing and now have two edit fields, one for each
   message.
6. Repeat steps 3-5 as often as necessary.
7. Preview and Publish.

There's stuff to still work out in there, but something like this
would be possible using just HTML. Of course, our threaded tree view
will need some magical refactoring.

--
Tarmo Toikkanen
http://www.iki.fi/tarmo/
The Fle3 Team
http://fle3.uiah.fi