A special site for exploring the outliner built into Radio UserLand.
FAQ
What is an outliner?
An outliner is a software program that makes it easy to create, organize and present information hierarchically.
The basic operations are expand-collapse, which allows you to control the level of detail you're viewing; and mouse or keyboard-based reorganization commands, that make it possible to change the relationship between facts and ideas.
What does an outliner look like?
Here's a screen shot of an outliner being used as part of an Internet-based workgroup.
Who are outliner users?
Outliners are for people whose work involves thinking, organizing and communicating.
Examples include engineers, managers, marketers, teachers, students, librarians, consultants, accountants, speech writers, scholars.
How long have outliners been around?
The first outliner was probably created by Doug Engelbart in the 1960s.
UserLand founder Dave Winer led the development of ThinkTank, Ready and MORE; all outliners, at Living Videotext in the 1980s.
Frontier brought outlining to programming in the early 90s, with a script editor that worked with code in an outliner.
How do outliners work over the Internet?
An outliner is both a browser and a writing tool.
An outline is just an XML document, in a special format called OPML. It's designed to allow different outlining software to transparently read and edit documents produced by other outliners.
Outlines, like HTML documents, can be stored on a server, and accessed over the Web, using the standard protocol of the Web, HyperText Transport Protocol, or HTTP.
Outlines define a web that is parallel to the HTML web, with important differences. HTML, today, is prettier. But the OPML web makes browsing easier, you can dive into linked documents seamlessly, as if they were part of the document containing the link. Further, since outlines are often connected to online journals called "weblogs," outlines can link to HTML pages, providing a convenient index that's easy to create, because the editor and the reader are integrated into one application.
Further, you can subscribe to another person's outline, making workgroups more productive, better organized, eliminating email, making archives easy, and lots of other cool things that we haven't forseen or figured out yet.
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Last update: Monday, March 18, 2002 at 10:27:58 AM.
Email: webmaster@userland.com
