On Feb 14, 2004, at 15:43, Dan Carlson wrote:
In a nutshell, my idea is this: Use FileMaker Pro
Developer (probably
version 7 when it comes out in a few months) to create a read-only
offline browser for my Memory Alpha wiki content.
I use FileMaker Pro at work, and find it maddeningly uncooperative, but
then I'm mostly trying to fetch data from it for use by external
programs, which it's not really good at. (It's got its own primitive
web template language which is useless for anything I do -- rendering
custom markup to HTML with interpage links -- so I have to jump through
hoops to get the data in/out.)
As you say rendering HTML would be a bit tricky. Hypertext with
embedded links is central to the experience, I think, and if FileMaker
can't do that, well that seems like a deal-breaker to me. Really what
it sounds like you need is an HTML viewer with a self-contained set of
documents extracted from the wiki.
Everybody's got a web browser these days; a simple static dump of a
bunch of HTML files may or may not be sufficient. There are some
scripts floating around to do that.
If you want a self-contained little app (custom interface, data
compression?, no monster file trees), there are embeddable databases
out there and certainly embeddable HTML viewers. Magnus Manske has
written a couple of experimental offline/alternate readers; one which
grabbed text out of a pre-indexed database dump and displayed it in a
wxWindows-based GUI (which has an HTML widget), another which uses an
SQLite database and a lightweight web server. You might want to check
out the Waikiki module in our CVS
(
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/) which has Magnus's
lightweight Wiki->HTML converter (in C++).
wxWindows is cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Unix at least) and includes
an HTML viewer widget, so a minimal viewer probably wouldn't be that
hard to write. Magnus's old code might still be around somewhere...
WINOR? Something like that.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)