Re: We need to start talking about group and public annotations

John Labovitz (johnl@ora.com)
Thu, 21 Jul 94 23:18:36 -0700


[Charles Ashley <charlesa@cosmos.learned.co.uk>]
> Agreed. What do you guys feel are the pros & problems of WIT? A good
> place to start? How are / would you do things differently?

maybe it's because 12 years of using usenet has affected
my mind, but i think WIT imposes too much structure.

for technical discussions on the level of `should feature
X be implemented in protocol Y?' the agree/disagree model
may work. but it seems to impose an argumentative mode
without necessarily requiring one. WIT seems to break down
for more mundane conversations, like discussions of movies
(one of the early topics).

also, i can't imagine trying to follow a continuing
conversation in WIT. it would be nice to see a list of
recent messages without having to enter each area of
topic/proposal/etc.

on the positive side, messages in WIT are *much* easier to
read than usenet messages, due to the automatic HTML encoding
(no more courier font!). and for those who know HTML well
enough, it looks like great fun to be able to write the
message itself in HTML.

--
John Labovitz
Global Network Navigator <http://gnn.com/>
O'Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol, California, USA (+1 707 829 0515)