From the writable web to global editability

Abstract

The technical and competence requirements for writing content on the web is still one of the major factors that widens the gap between authors and readers. Although tools that support an easy approach to web writing, such as blogs and wikis, are becoming increasingly important and mainstream, they still lack in terms of layout and typographical sophistication, and, most importantly, only allow local editing (on the pages that are stored by the application itself). In this paper we re-propose an old paradigm for writing content on the net, directly derived from the Xanadu vision by Ted Nelson: global editability foresees that all documents on the web can be accessed for editing and modified on line, very much as in a global wiki. Global editability needs to address a number of issues, including correct support for intellectual property and legal issues, before it can be accepted as an idea. We provide some considerations on technical issues of global editability, and describe the architecture and implementation of a system, called IsaWiki, that is being developed at the University of Bologna.