This is scary. I just found it on Freshmeat.

http://lesserwiki.org

It's a wiki/CMS that seems to be built with the understanding that the rules of interacting with a web site need to be thrown out and rewritten. The back button is irrelavent because never leave the URL of the home page. New content that you browse to appears at the top of what appears to be a stack in the middle column. If you click on a link to a glossary-type object, it appears in the second position in the stack, leaving the current content in the first position--then it scrolls down to show the glossary entry. And WTF is it with all the different link colors? At this point I just got scared and ran away.

Ohhh, you didn't like it?
Well, wait until the version with ads comes up.

But I liked the color style!

 

Every now and then I hear a strong argument as to why certain programmers don't belong in a graphical field. This rule doesn't apply to all of them, but would requiring approval to both code AND make decisions about interface be such a bad idea? One need only look at about half of the Linux window managers (the ones where 'minimalism' is too cluttered. The kind that, if it was the only one on a computer you had to use, you'd just stay in the 80x24 console.)

Here's a fine example of technology abuse. AJAX-based Wiki? WTF! A wiki is low-tech by definition, it should be usable with Lynx.

As for the choice of colors... it looks like one of those sites built on purpose as a counter-example of Web design. I hope it's a joke.

I think the colors and the way you feel a little lost are trippy. Too bad they only support two languages on one page. It would be fun to see like 10 or 20 languages on one screen. It's widely known that 90% of Ruby programmers became insane when they read Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, so this wiki should surprise no one. AJAX, ShmAJAX.

A company I was at for a little while pioneered this.

They absolutely hated the Refresh -- you know, the momentary "blink" between page clicks. They felt that, if their web-based software did that, they failed because it provided a "distrubing" experience for the users. I would have attributed the poor experience to their attrocious UI design though.

Each new application they developed provided a new way to try this. They used IFrames, ActiveX, and, my personal favorite, the client-side recordset: http://www.thedailywtf.com/forums/40674/ShowPost.aspx. Oddly, they never quite got into XMLHTTP.

It was a *very* interesting day when a client wanted to be able to bookmark a page on their website, or send someone a link to something other than the home page ... that was fun.

Alex Papadimoulis wrote:

Each new application they developed provided a new way to try this. They used IFrames, ActiveX, and, my personal favorite, the client-side recordset: http://www.thedailywtf.com/forums/40674/ShowPost.aspx. Oddly, they never quite got into XMLHTTP.

I guess XMLHttpRequest is too simple and elegant - it wouldn't go with the company's style, now would it?

Alex Papadimoulis wrote:

It was a *very* interesting day when a client wanted to be able to bookmark a page on their website, or send someone a link to something other than the home page ... that was fun.

I can imagine :D Some people in the bussiness don't seem to understand the difference between a Web application and a thin client solution. Then again, some people utterly fail to understand what the Web is all about.

Sigh!

Eyes bleeding....

Well, it *is* called "lesser" wiki.

Wikis are wiking idiotic anyway. How does letting everybody mess with everything make for a manageable, usable content repository? A wiki is nothing more but the aftermath of a food fight at the federal penitentiary.

rogthefrog wrote:

Wikis are wiking idiotic anyway. How does letting everybody mess with everything make for a manageable, usable content repository? A wiki is nothing more but the aftermath of a food fight at the federal penitentiary.

Hey now, wikis have a lot of uses. As you describe them "where everyone can edit anything" they are quite usable in an environment with a small team working on a project and writing their ideas and nots in a wiki. How Wikipedia made this work on a global scale is beyond me.

And you a wiki doesn't have to be open. I used Dokuwiki to rebuild my web site last week (and it *seriously* needed rebuilding), and I'm the only user in the world who can make edits at this point. Dokuwiki (and most other wiki engines) have some neat features that make them great for personal web sites: the organization of content is rather ad-hoc--if you change your mind, it's usually not too hard to reorganize stuff; the markup is *so* much simpler than HTML; it gives me a change history for every page, so it's a lot harder to accidentally destroy content you didn't mean to.

Wikis aren't idiotic; they just allow you to do idiotic things--just like a lot of other technology we talk about here.

Brendan Kidwell wrote:

And you a wiki doesn't have to be open.

Note to self: stop posting on forums while at work when people can interrupt you.

Alex Papadimoulis wrote:

It was a *very* interesting day when a client wanted to be able to bookmark a page on their website, or send someone a link to something other than the home page ... that was fun.

It would have been even more interesting if the client's highly paid SEO specialist was there too.  Its hard to sell the undocumented "stealth site" feature to clients these days.

While I completely agree that the colors on that page are quite creepy, you're missing a few details about it:
It's (originally http://tiddlywiki.com) designed as a personal notebook/blog which runs offline(eg. from an usbstick, which works great...) and while I don't know this specific serverside implementation, at least the fact that you stay on the same URL is not an issue at all as you can simply use the "permalink" button on every note to bookmark it, and you don't need the back button as you can view as many links as you want at the same time.
Also, it's a great toy  'cause you can write the stylesheet(s) and plugins directly as "tiddlers"(notes), check eg. http://simonbaird.com/mptw/ for some examples....

Sorry for the ad, but while that thingy surely breaks some common rules about webdesign, for it's specific purpose it's the only tool I actually enjoy using...

Now here's something funny: the LesserWiki FAQ links to this very forum thread and explains why it is the way it is. Or so I think it does - I too got scared, plus I had to go back here and type this post I'm typing now. And now. And now. And...

I came, I saw, I went blind from the color-scheme...

 

Some people need to be dipped in tar and feather and then kicked out from any civilized area. Let them waste their time on some deserted island with one coconut palmtree, lots of sand and a view over the ocean in all directions. Webdesigners like this one should be castrated to avoid them reproducing and producing more bad webdesigners...

rogthefrog wrote:

Well, it *is* called "lesser" wiki. Wikis are wiking idiotic anyway. How does letting everybody mess with everything make for a manageable, usable content repository? A wiki is nothing more but the aftermath of a food fight at the federal penitentiary.

Some wikis are actually extremely interresting, but that requires an intelligent, high level, dedicated user base.

See Ward Cunningham (more or less the inventor of the Wiki concept)'s Wiki http://c2.com/. It's full of extremely high level guys and a heap of informations and insight.

How does letting everybody mess with everything make for a manageable, usable content repository?

Wikipedia is setting up accounts in order to prevent trolling and misinformation.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8425

masklinn wrote:

Some wikis are actually extremely interresting, but that requires an intelligent, high level, dedicated user base. See Ward Cunningham (more or less the inventor of the Wiki concept)'s Wiki http://c2.com/. It's full of extremely high level guys and a heap of informations and insight.

Along with flames, disinformation, bizarre nutjobs, stuff no one cares about, and demonic code.

Really, it's just like any other good forum. =D

dhromed wrote:

How does letting everybody mess with everything make for a manageable, usable content repository? Wikipedia is setting up accounts in order to prevent trolling and misinformation. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8425

We'll see. The commons is so entrenched in wikipedia that it would have to completely reinvent itself to become a top-quality common encyclopedia, where topical experts would own articles and approve changes, the way the open source world has always worked.

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