He’s Back! Dave Winer Teases A JS HTML5 In Browser Outliner

On Monday of this week, somewhat quietly, we released the docs for the outliner we’ve been developing at Small Picture, Inc.

http://smallpicture.com/outlinerHowto.html

The docs are interesting, if you like outliners — but also interesting because they illustrate something important about the outliner. It’s very easy to include in a web page.

There’s a practice outliner right there on the docs page. Kind of subtle. šŸ˜‰

via Scripting News: It’s an outliner!.

If I were looking for a killer app, an outliner that runs completely in theĀ browserĀ and is always on the network would certainly fit the bill.Ā AndĀ that is just what Dave Winer and his programming partner Kyle Shank are bringing us from their new startup Small Picture.Ā TheirĀ goal is “to bring outlining software to the browser environment, in JavaScript, through the power of HTML 5.”

The outliner in a browser that’s linked in the quote above seems to really deliver. It offers all of the features that you’ve come to expect in a Winer Outliner and includes features that will appeal to programmers too. Dave promises to reveal new bits of the browser outliner over the coming Mondays, so there’s something to look forward to.

I’ll be very interested in seeing just how this outliner rolls out. A quick peek into theĀ JavaScriptĀ that makes it go shows it’s reading/writing from a given OPML file. Going forward the ability to create, share, and collaborate on a network of OPML files is going to be where the “killer app” aspect of this product lies. I hope this means a distributed network of OPML hosts offering browser based access to the outlines.

And boy would it be nice if the server side would run on Linux.