Matthew Cooke

Let's start off with the basic principals of a wiki. The original C2 wiki covers the basics of why wikis work pretty well. Of particular note is the following:

"Wiki is not WysiWyg. It's an intelligence test of sorts to be able to edit a wiki page. It's not rocket science, but it doesn't appeal to the VideoAddicts. If it doesn't appeal, they don't participate, which leaves those of us who read and write to get on with rational discourse."

So when I tell you that jotspot is a so called WYSIWYG wiki you would be right to be suspicious! After all ,we all know the kind of crap that WYSIWYG generators generally produce (see MS Frontpage!). But I was willing to give Jotspot a go. Well, here are some of the improvements jotspot has made to the concept of the wiki:

• Quick and simple to create new page.
  • Jotspot improves this experience by assuming you perhaps want to create a spreadsheet every time you try to create a new page.

• Wiki-syntax is not WYSIWYG
  • Jotspot improves on this experience by defaulting you to WYSIWYG rather than wiki syntax this enables lazy users to mess up your wiki markup very quickly.
  • Better still, using the default WYSIWYG often actually breaks the pages so they can no longer be edited in normal markup mode. Ever. Genius.

• Original wikis used a simple textarea for input.
  • Jotspot improves on this with Web2.0 goodies such as pages that keep refreshing for no reason and sucking all your CPU.
  • Jotspot also uses a javascript pulldown menu instead of a button, just to edit in markup mode! This is both annoying and broken in some browsers.
  • The usual form page doesn't appear in the history, so no navigating back and fore. Instead when you click back you get an annoying javascript popup telling you maybe you didn't want to move off the page because you will lose everything. Which indeed you will.

Finally I'd just like to share some of my favourite random jotspot errors:
Additional information:
com.s3.script.lib.JotLibException: function filterBadHTML: parameter html: no value specified.

After which jotspot becomes unuseable