Submitted by 1.kenthomas (not verified) on Fri, 02/08/2008 - 20:12.
John,
I was thinking of proposing a session called something like “What’s in a name? Drupal, Xanadu, hypertext, transclusion and Web Publishing 2.0.” (You’ve reminded me to put in a call to Ted Nelson.)
From my standpoint — starting with Tripod.com before it had even a name, progressing through a Ph.D. program in Rhetoric and on to the Xanadu “original hypertext” folks— providing a name for something that is essentially new in the world is a difficult thing. Was there hypertext before Ted called it hypertext?
Is Drupal really a hypertextual system?
Calling something a “Content Management System” (or Framework) or GroupWare (is that what SharePoint is?) or, egads, “Web 2.0” (speaking of a near-meaningless term) is, after all, at best, an attempt to give a meaningful label to something we don’t quite understand— and certainly can’t pigeonhole— in a shifting industry, in a time of rapidly changing technology.
SharePoint is social? Most of what we (at the Horton Group) use is for is sort of advanced, not-quite-SVN, always available group folders… ignoring its other aspects, which we do better on other tools and platforms. Blog via Sharepoint, Wiki— Wiki?!?!— you’ve got to be kidding. SharePoint does a few things well, a few things ok… and for a lot of things, it’s a horrible solution hoisted upon poor, wretched people whose employers do not know better.
“Chat—” or “instant messaging—” something I played with at Tripod on the side, before Steve Case found a more popular way to do it? SharePoint has some interesting features, along with collaborative document management— though at other times this is just clunky. It’s OK; I don’t know of anything better in the PC/Mac/or Windows world.
But Solaris… in many ways, a lot of the above functions or functionalities were implemented well (better) by the Sun 2 series: if you were one of the lucky people to be “online” in the mid-80s, and you could afford a Sun workstation, its “group” file sharing capacities (etc) were better than SharePoint’s.
By and large, none of the above is included in Drupal (there is a chat plug-in, (but…) . So if you view SharePoint as a tool which accomplishes the above tasks— well or not— Drupal is really not, evidently, in the same space.
I tend to describe Drupal as a web publishing platform akin to Vignette— or others— platforms whose buy-in starts at $300K, and then you have to hire someone at $100K + load to install it.
What I am getting at is not easy to put into a few words (much less buzzwords)— but (HTML-)Apache, an individual academic-demo “web publishing tool” which only sprang into wide use with Nate Kruz turning it into a branching-server program at Tripod, has never been a very sophisticated or “high-level” tool for dealing with and publishing text on the web. It publishes; it allows links; it now has conventions for formatting, and that’s about it.
The big corporations— IBM, Xerox, Ford, etc.— have always had access to much bigger tools — at least judged in terms of dollars and budgets, but also by functionalities and possibilities. Last I had a — trial, discounted via the help of a VP— version of IBM’s search tool, (a beast written in a combo of C and Perl and other junk)— it cost $100K and did great stuff, like automatically cache the webpages you told it to crawl in a (IBM proprietary) database and, in addition to auto-tagging them via taxonomies (define them yourself or let the tool make up taxonomies), spit them back out in various structured HTML and other markup formats, ready for reuse…
Is that a search tool? It sure as heck ain’t the same thing as Google!
Drupal, as I see it, is a multifaceted web publishing tool (you can call it “online collaboration” if you want, but if you call it “social networking,” don’t expect that term to be in common use in a decade). Just like SharePoint— whose functionalities are all over the board (and partially a revision of PARC’s “paperless office,” and partially, after all, a revision of Lotus)— it’s hard to say exactly what it is, and in fact, not entirely clear. Is SharePoint a CMS? It accomplishes some of those functions, but…
From the point of view of Xanadu— the “original hypertext project”— two things are clear to me. First, Drupal is, approached from a general sense, an online, “internet” tool for publishing (sharing), collectively working with and using information— a parallel equivalent to the web/webserver, and to WAIS, older systems like Socrates, 123/Notes, and etc. Second, it is one of a small number of open projects which make some of the publishing power and possibilities of “things like Vignette” available to — anyone and everyone.
The problem with the Vignettes of the world— other than that they have only been available to corporations and governments— and that they are closed-source, and that means not just in code, but that what they do is largely hidden to the public— is that they are, like so much of the web today, deeply fragmented.
Vignette does things one way; TeamSite, another; Documentum, get another; and between the three, there is no common framework, overlap, or exchange. You cannot at all easily share a document with someone in one system, with someone in another, or publish it (and comments) to a “website” built on the other system.
Why should there be? What does this have to do with Drupal (and what Drupal is or should be).
Well, my time is up— I’m late for dinner plans, and I had meant to talk about transclusion.
John,
I was thinking of proposing a session called something like “What’s in a name? Drupal, Xanadu, hypertext, transclusion and Web Publishing 2.0.” (You’ve reminded me to put in a call to Ted Nelson.)
From my standpoint — starting with Tripod.com before it had even a name, progressing through a Ph.D. program in Rhetoric and on to the Xanadu “original hypertext” folks— providing a name for something that is essentially new in the world is a difficult thing. Was there hypertext before Ted called it hypertext?
Is Drupal really a hypertextual system?
Calling something a “Content Management System” (or Framework) or GroupWare (is that what SharePoint is?) or, egads, “Web 2.0” (speaking of a near-meaningless term) is, after all, at best, an attempt to give a meaningful label to something we don’t quite understand— and certainly can’t pigeonhole— in a shifting industry, in a time of rapidly changing technology.
SharePoint is social? Most of what we (at the Horton Group) use is for is sort of advanced, not-quite-SVN, always available group folders… ignoring its other aspects, which we do better on other tools and platforms. Blog via Sharepoint, Wiki— Wiki?!?!— you’ve got to be kidding. SharePoint does a few things well, a few things ok… and for a lot of things, it’s a horrible solution hoisted upon poor, wretched people whose employers do not know better.
“Chat—” or “instant messaging—” something I played with at Tripod on the side, before Steve Case found a more popular way to do it? SharePoint has some interesting features, along with collaborative document management— though at other times this is just clunky. It’s OK; I don’t know of anything better in the PC/Mac/or Windows world.
But Solaris… in many ways, a lot of the above functions or functionalities were implemented well (better) by the Sun 2 series: if you were one of the lucky people to be “online” in the mid-80s, and you could afford a Sun workstation, its “group” file sharing capacities (etc) were better than SharePoint’s.
By and large, none of the above is included in Drupal (there is a chat plug-in, (but…) . So if you view SharePoint as a tool which accomplishes the above tasks— well or not— Drupal is really not, evidently, in the same space.
I tend to describe Drupal as a web publishing platform akin to Vignette— or others— platforms whose buy-in starts at $300K, and then you have to hire someone at $100K + load to install it.
What I am getting at is not easy to put into a few words (much less buzzwords)— but (HTML-)Apache, an individual academic-demo “web publishing tool” which only sprang into wide use with Nate Kruz turning it into a branching-server program at Tripod, has never been a very sophisticated or “high-level” tool for dealing with and publishing text on the web. It publishes; it allows links; it now has conventions for formatting, and that’s about it.
The big corporations— IBM, Xerox, Ford, etc.— have always had access to much bigger tools — at least judged in terms of dollars and budgets, but also by functionalities and possibilities. Last I had a — trial, discounted via the help of a VP— version of IBM’s search tool, (a beast written in a combo of C and Perl and other junk)— it cost $100K and did great stuff, like automatically cache the webpages you told it to crawl in a (IBM proprietary) database and, in addition to auto-tagging them via taxonomies (define them yourself or let the tool make up taxonomies), spit them back out in various structured HTML and other markup formats, ready for reuse…
Is that a search tool? It sure as heck ain’t the same thing as Google!
Drupal, as I see it, is a multifaceted web publishing tool (you can call it “online collaboration” if you want, but if you call it “social networking,” don’t expect that term to be in common use in a decade). Just like SharePoint— whose functionalities are all over the board (and partially a revision of PARC’s “paperless office,” and partially, after all, a revision of Lotus)— it’s hard to say exactly what it is, and in fact, not entirely clear. Is SharePoint a CMS? It accomplishes some of those functions, but…
From the point of view of Xanadu— the “original hypertext project”— two things are clear to me. First, Drupal is, approached from a general sense, an online, “internet” tool for publishing (sharing), collectively working with and using information— a parallel equivalent to the web/webserver, and to WAIS, older systems like Socrates, 123/Notes, and etc. Second, it is one of a small number of open projects which make some of the publishing power and possibilities of “things like Vignette” available to — anyone and everyone.
The problem with the Vignettes of the world— other than that they have only been available to corporations and governments— and that they are closed-source, and that means not just in code, but that what they do is largely hidden to the public— is that they are, like so much of the web today, deeply fragmented.
Vignette does things one way; TeamSite, another; Documentum, get another; and between the three, there is no common framework, overlap, or exchange. You cannot at all easily share a document with someone in one system, with someone in another, or publish it (and comments) to a “website” built on the other system.
Why should there be? What does this have to do with Drupal (and what Drupal is or should be).
Well, my time is up— I’m late for dinner plans, and I had meant to talk about transclusion.