TiddlyWiki/Printable version

TiddlyWiki

The current, editable version of this book is available in Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection, at
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki

Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this document under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Introduction

Some history

As the name implies, TiddlyWiki takes its primary inspiration from the kind of interactive, more or less "social" web site, that has come to be known as a wiki. The original concept was defined and demonstrated in the mid-1990's by Ward Cunningham for the purpose of building what he called the Portland Pattern Repository and it's rather more broadly scoped derivative forum, the WikiWikiWeb. The latter name was obviously inspired by the still fairly "hot" new concept called the World Wide Web, while Cunningham explains the 'WikiWiki' part as being a Hawaiian word for 'quick'. While certainly a forum in nature, it was distinctively different from the bulletin board services and the Usenet forums that pre-dated the WWW architecture and its defining protocols, HTTP and HTML. The design of the WikiWikiWeb - and most of the solutions that have followed - builds on both these protocols: HTTP as the way the web browser speaks to a server somewhere on the internet, and HTML as the language that the web browser interprets as defining the structure of the content. To achieve their goals, early "wiki" engines focused on creating rather simple server-side solutions for letting the users build the content directly through the web browser. Ward Cunningham's original idea made a virtue out of this simplicity, which relied on the users to take care that the content stayed on topic and continued to evolve in a positive direction, despite a total lack of hard measures to protect the content, they were building.

One of the obvious characteristics of the WikiWikiWeb, the extensive use of hyperlinks, was of course nothing new. Cunningham relates that he was inspired by the HyperCard application developed by Apple Computer for their Macintosh PC's in the mid-1980's. What he did was to define the convention that writing a word using CamelCase, often by SmashingWordsTogetherLikeThis would automatically make it a link to a page by that name. Strictly speaking, this mechanism commonly known as WikiLinks isn't entirely automatic, the server takes care of generating the HTML that it sends to the browser in such a way that it works, but this is still a novel idea compared to placing the chore on the shoulders of the writer. An aspect of this idea is that if a Page named TiddlyWiki exists on the site, and an author of another pages writes TiddlyWiki, not really knowing that this page exists, the rendered page will have the link all the same.

TiddlyWiki adopts this idea, but restricts the scope of the automatic linking to be within the HTML document itself, as we shall see.

Uses

http://giffmex.tiddlyspot.com/#%5B%5BTiddlyWiki%20Showcase%5D%5D

TW Help http://twhelp.tiddlyspot.com

http://www.giffmex.org/twfortherestofus.html

TiddlyWiki compared to MediaWiki

TiddlyWiki isn’t like a traditional MediaWiki or Confluence wiki which requires a database server and PHP in order to run. TiddlyWiki is a self contained .html file that you can use in any modern web browser even without internet access.

Like its big brother, MediaWiki (the web program that wikipedia runs), TiddlyWiki’s core trait is that it supports simple formatting syntax, and simple links to pages within itself. If you’re in wikipedia, and you’re viewing a page called Piano, and there is a reference to “Mozart”, instead of having to create a hyperlink containing “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Amadeus_Mozart,” all you have to do is write “[[Mozart]]”. TiddlyWiki has a similar simplified syntax.

Writing

Totally differing mark-up syntax between MediaWiki and TiddlyWiki

Formatting	MediaWiki	TiddlyWiki	What it looks like
Heading 1	=Heading=	!Heading	Heading 1
Heading 2	==Heading==	!!Heading	Heading 2
Heading 3	===Heading===	!!!Heading	Heading 3
Heading 4	====Heading====	!!!!Heading	Heading 4
External links	[http://google.com external site]	[[external site|http://google.com]]	external site
Images	[[Image:SomeImageName.jpg]]	[img[http://url.to.SomeImageName.jpg]]	No example
Bold	'''Bold'''	''Bold''	Bold
Italic	''Italic''	//Italic//	Italic
Underline	<u>Underline</u>	__Underline__	Underline
Strike out	<s>Strike out</s>	--Strike out--	Strike out

Almost identical mark-up syntax between MediaWiki and TiddlyWiki

Formatting	MediaWiki	TiddlyWiki	What it looks like
Unordered lists	*List Item **Sub Item **#Mixed list type	*List Item **Sub Item ###Mixed list type	List Item Sub Item Mixed list type
Ordered lists	#First item #Second item ##Second level ###Third level	#First item #Second item ##Second level ###Third level	First item Second item Second level Third level

Identical mark-up syntax between MediaWiki and TiddlyWiki

Formatting	MediaWiki	TiddlyWiki	What it looks like
Horizontal ruler	----	----