Just what is an outliner?

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
May 5, 2017 at 02:55 PM

Paul Korm wrote:

> I purposefully eliminated “hierarchy” from this scope for two reasons. “Hierarchy” is merely a relationship, just as links (visual and hyperlinks), attribute groupings, are all mere relatiionships. Hierarchy might be important for many readers, but it is also very limiting.

Understood. The fact that it is limiting is one of the benefits of the dedicated outliner. It forces a logical, step-by-step relationship, rather than a free form relationship (as TheBrain does, and as the MapView of Tinderbox* does). If you want to outline a paper before writing it, you need to rely eventually on hierarchy.

And without hierarchy we’re not talking about outlines at all, in my view. Which is fine. I don’t in any way want to imply we shouldn’t talk about other types of note organizers either on this forum or even in this thread. Just trying to get my own terminology straight. Why does this matter? Well, it helps you find what you’re looking for. Clearly, for example, Luhmann has a specific style of outliner in mind for his list. Having a way to describe what he is looking for is obviously important. I don’t want to go shopping for sedans and be shown pickup trucks by the car salesman. So it helps to be able to use the word “sedan” and have others know what I’m talking about.

Perhaps it would be clearer to say I want a GrandView-style outliner (Plato’s Theory of Forms applied to this discussion, with GrandView being the ideal version of the single-pane outliner). This is all semantics, but semantics are important for clear communication. And none of what I’ve written here refutes what you’re saying, Paul, about how to go about finding the best application for your needs. But if you already have a clear idea of the type of user interface you’re looking for, why not be able to define it with one phrase?

*One of the intriguing attributes of Tinderbox is that it allows free-form mapping only at one level of hierarchy at a time (not entirely true, as you can draw relationships across levels, but I find those of little use). But it gives you deep hierarchical visualization via the outline view.

Steve Z.