The ultimate outliner

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 19, 2013 at 02:48 PM

Dr Andus wrote:
>Just to distill what I was getting at in the previous post: I think the
>ultimate outliner needs to have a very easy (drag-n-drop, hotkey,
>markup) internal and external linking capability, so that all items and
>notes can be linked to each other, can link to items and notes in other
>applications, and they can be linked to from other apps too.

I beg to (partly) differ: as far as external linking goes, your approach is fine for me, as the linked material isn’t within the outline anyway, so one might as well deal with it as if it were a footnote or endnote; i.e. with a [1] or other mark within the detail text, which links to the external resource. I think it could also be useful to automatically gather all such external links in a separate pane.

However, in respect to internal links, it seems to me that the usual URL-type link actually works counter-productively. The reason is that if you put this in the detail text, it is not shown in the outline, and thus obscures the real structure.

I believe that clones are a much more outline-friendly solution to the issue of internal linking: if entity A in the outline refers to entity B in the same outline, all you have to do is create a clone of the referenced entity (B) as a child or sibling of entity A. This reference is then apparent in the outline, helping someone see both the wood and the tree.

I have never appreciated the wiki way in particular; I find it very powerful but non-conducive to structure. Again, for me outliners are tools to bring order out of chaos, and therefore structure is paramount. It appears that the Piggydb creator has a similar issue with wikis, because the main way to link text fragments in Piggydb is outside the fragment detail, making the relationships an integral part of the fragment overview.