[olpc-software] Wiki as eBook reader

[Christopher Blizzard]

Hi, John!  Comments inline.

John Marshall wrote:
> Theory of operation...
> 
> Very much a wiki.  Each 'ebook' is a separate sqlite database that can
> have pages of arbitrary content entered into it (text, images, files,
> anything).  It implements a subset of the wiki markup used by MediaWiki
> for basic document creation and linking.
> 
> Transfer of books is straightforward as they are single files.  You may
> want to gzip them to reduce their transit size.
> 
> In terms of styling documents it's all down to CSS.  Not quite sure of
> the best way to integrate it.  Maybe the presence of a <page_name>_css
> page causes it to be added as an additional stylesheet?

That sounds pretty reasonable, all things considered.  I don't know what 
the UI might look like for that, though.  For the Sugar framework we've 
been building services for discovering "who is around" and exposing that 
through services.  That UI drives a lot of things and I thought that you 
might have considered how it will work and act before working on the 
lower level details?

> String handling is done is a very traditional C manner and I suspect it
> will break on some multibyte character encodings.  Anyone know of a good
> C library for handling these character formats?

glib.

> Uploaded files have to be loaded completely into memory for database
> insert/retrieve operations.  This limits the max size of files that
> handled to the available memory.  Would anyone want to put a 50MB file
> into a book? Maybe.

I think we might want to stop them before that happens. :)

But seriously.  We've been spending a lot of time thinking about what 
the collaboration aspects look like.  They drive many of the other 
requirements.  How to share, how to browser and how to expose what 
someone else is working on.  Have you done any thinking about what that 
might look like in this model?

--Chris