Sexified monkey, hellafied monkey, killified monkey
And wikified templates! JotSpot has inspired me to move Cornucopt’s HTML templates (the HTML files, with wacky stuff written into them, that take raw CoCo-generated data and make them into web pages, via a package called Smarty) inside of Cornucopt itself, such that mere users might be able to write their own. (And such that the templates get the advantages of wiki, like a version history, et cetera.) Combined with pagevars and a helping of what B.A. Baracus would call “jazz,” this could get us almost all the functionality of JotSpot’s forms and searches. Right now, Cornucopt’s templates live in separate files, in a little folder called ‘templates’ in the CoCo file tree. This is much handier for my current purposes than having to edit them in a browser, which is why this change isn’t scheduled for a while.
Will there be security headaches? Well, you have to really trust users to let them write arbitrary HTML. JavaScript is harmful to children and other living things. IFRAMEs are just as bad if not worse. Those are the easy ones; determining exactly what subset of HTML users really need to build applications will take some thinking. Also, the searching thing really is half the battle - I may need to implement XPath the way JotSpot does to allow people to select the pages they need to. Allowing people to create pages that create other pages could get hairy, essentially becoming a flooding attack. So I’ll have to design that carefully.
Just taking the templates into the wiki is not so difficult compared to the rest of the picture. I should really make a detailed roadmap. That was kind of a non sequitur. I want to be able to do a cartwheel.
October 15th, 2004