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Just what is an outliner?
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
May 5, 2017 at 08:28 PM
Paul, I request that you read my response to you again. I think you’ll find I didn’t feel “torqued” at all. I was just trying to react to some of the things you wrote, which is the point of a discussion.
Paul Korm wrote:
I think I’ll stop here, permanently, since it seems I have completely
>lost the ability to understand what people are posting here, and
>torquing everyone off as a result.
>
>The thread and introductory topic for this thread was “Just what is an
>outliner”. Once again I learn that the topic is actually “what is a
>dedicated outliner”
>
>I don’t think an “outliner” is a term definable capable of any precision
>from a software sense. “Dedicated outliner” is an even flabbier term, I
>believe. If it’s all in the eye of the beholder (the Potter Stewart
>standard) then its meaningless and incommunicable.
>
>Whack! Ouch. I stand corrected again, for the fourth time in as many
>days. I will be forever gone. Bye.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
May 5, 2017 at 08:30 PM
Pierre,
Thank you for sensibly pointing us to a definition of outliner.
Steve Z.
Pierre Paul Landry wrote:
Paul Korm wrote:
>I think I’ll stop here, permanently, since it seems I have completely
>lost the ability to understand what people are posting here, and
>torquing everyone off as a result. (...) I will be forever gone. Bye.
>
>Sad to see you go Paul. Communities should be inclusive, not divisive…
>
>Wikipedia does provide a definition of an Outliner:
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner
>
>In my view, an outliner is the ability to show information in an
>outline, with expand / collapse. Period.
>But it needs not be limited to this outline view. The ability to view
>the information in an outline AND in a flat (or flatter) view is very
>useful. In a nut shell, sometimes the outline gets in the way, so a flat
>view is useful.
>
>HTH !
>
>Pierre
>
>
>
Posted by Chris Murtland
May 5, 2017 at 10:06 PM
I have an expansive view of what constitutes an outliner - the ability to manipulate a hierarchy. Even expanding and collapsing might not be included (I feel like BrainStorm on Windows is a type of outliner even though you don’t expand or collapse nodes, you simply zoom in and out of them). On the flip side, I think I know what people mean when they are talking about a dedicated outliner - but I could be wrong. The distinctions single-pane, two-pane, etc., seem pretty well understood and useful.
However, even my definition confuses me because I consider a mind mapper something related but not quite equivalent to an outliner, even though it technically fits my definition.
In any case, I do love that there is a place where heated debate can ensue over the definition of an outliner!
Posted by yosemite
May 6, 2017 at 04:22 AM
I think of an outline as being a list with sequence and hierarchy, where the user controls both. To me a mind map is usually not an outline because sequence doesn’t matter. I think of them as a tree. In an outline sub-items have a user-controlled or manually assigned sequence, in a tree they generally don’t. Another example of tree is the folder tree in a file manager. Often the sub-items are automatically sorted alphabetically and can’t be manually ordered.
Following from that overly-long definition of terms… to me an outliner is an editor for (text) outlines. So, good control over sequence, hierarchy, and, importantly, text. There’s got to be more than a dash of text editing, otherwise it just doesn’t seem like an outliner to me. More of an organizer of items, as others have mentioned.
Outliners with additional features, views, structures, can still be outliners. wiki-style links between items comes to mind. Columns. Inline images. And so on.
Side note: the dictionaries I looked at don’t have “our” definition of outline. They say nothing about hierarchy and few even mention list. They say “plan” and “summary”.
Posted by jaslar
May 7, 2017 at 02:46 AM
Agreed about “this is a fun topic to think about together.” I’ll take a swing at it, and might learn something.
I think the wikipedia article is pretty right on. It’s the “dedicated” part of this thread that I’m struggling with. Here’s my premise: at minimum, an outliner displays and manipulates relationships in three ways.
1. It shows the hierarchical relationship: parent, child, sibling.
2. It allows for the selective collapse and reveal of children to reveal structure.
3. It allows for the rapid reordering of the structure - promoting, demoting, moving - such that all the children, for instance, can go along.
I’ve seen some pretty barebones outliners that do just that - no hoisting, no cloning, no additional text columns, etc. But if it has those three things, or can give me a view like that, TO ME, it’s an outliner. So I find, Stephen, that I have no trouble calling Editorial (markup headers that can be folded, and draggable blocks that let me reorder the structural relationships) is an outliner. Freeplane has an outline mode or view: good enough for me. Compared to Dynalist, the commands for folding markdown might be clunkier, but that’s interface, not function. Likewise, I think of something like Inspiration. It was one of the first, one pane outliners with the core feature set. But now, it’s also a concept mapper, a graphical outliner. But it seems wrong to say it’s no longer a “dedicated” outliner. It is if you use those features.
For many years, I used Notecase almost exclusively. Again, in my view it’s absolutely an outliner. It just also allows me to add longer text notes. But the value of it is that I can glance at the left column to see the relationships and shuffle things around.
One, two, and three pane outliners remains a useful distinction to me. I can also see the value of tracking software that does this under one software package on both Mac and iOS platforms.
But I guess I would respectfully disagree both with the notion of “dedicated” and outliners that don’t show hierarchy.
I do see a difference between outliners in which every paragraph is a “header” and ones in which some text blocks are not hierarchical (embedded notes that operate more like regular word processing. But - and I do realize this gets tricky - I don’t think that’s a core feature. It’s just an APPROACH to outlining. KAMAS had an 88 character limit on a header; attached text could be paragraphs long, but your couldn’t use outliner function on those, just the headers. MORE treated any paragraph as manipulable. Both both were outliners.
OK, y’all, take me to school! (And Paul, I don’t think anybody was miffed. Come on back and stumble around with the rest of us.)