Markdown vs WSYWYG

Posted by Chris Murtland
Sep 5, 2013 at 11:32 PM

22111 wrote:
>I think I have understood some former explanations in this way that CT
>is a wiki, where you create new items from their links to existing
>items, and this is not an outliner. Then, you can (from what I have,
>perhaps wrongly, understood) built up specific outlines within ranges of
>such “hypercards”, in order to have quicker access to those
>“cards”/items within that “stack”/range of items, but by no means,
>you’ll get a 10,000 items “tree” for your 10,000 cards, except manually,
>this way, “put the current item to the current tree” or something.
> >So, if in the end you need an outline, with CT you will be lost, since
>it will not deliver this outline, only partial outlines here and there
>where the investment of your time and effort will be justified by your
>ABSOLUTE need of an outline at least there, but for all the rest, you
>will have to live with your wiki.

I think I see what you’re saying… CT is never a “complete” outliner (unless you build it manually, as you say) in the sense that every single item is necessarily represented in one canonical outline as in a traditional two-pane outliner. However, in real life, CT’s approach seems to be a feature rather than a flaw. Having multiple, arbitrary outlines representing a network of information solves a lot of issues related to trying to represent reality with a single tree.

For one thing, you can create any number of *limited* outlines that represent a view/snapshot that may be temporal, contextual, etc., while not modifying the underlying data. In other words, CT allows superimposing an arbitrary number of outlines over a data store that is not inherently hierarchical.

But if you insist that reality is a tree rather than a graph, you will probably be forever frustrated with CT.