Update: If you came here from Stephen Downes’ Online Daily post, then you were probably looking for my article on informational cascades, which you can find here.
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Last night I posted a longish comment to the OpenACS discussion boards. (OpenACS is the Open Source toolkit upon which the dotLRN course management system is based.) OpenACS, with it’s heritage as a system originally designed by Philip Greenspun to support the Photo.net knowledge-sharing community, has one of the best discussion board implementations I’ve seen. The development community keeps the big picture simple and focuses on small but usability-enhancing features.
Well, they’ve done it again. In the process of posting, I discovered a (relatively?) new feature in the current version that I absolutely love. One of the problems with a discussion board (or blog) that supports email (or RSS) is HTML support. On a web page, there’s no reason not to support hyperlinks in posts. But many people turn off HTML in their email clients for security reasons, and escaping into HTML within an RSS feed is somewhat controversial and problematic. So how do you provide hyperlink support that degrades gracefully for non-browser clients?
What OpenACS does is it scans your post for hyperlinks, removes those links, replaces them with footnote markers, and writes out the URLs in footnotes at the bottom of the post. On the web page, these URLs a clickable hyperlinks. But in an email message or RSS feed where the user can’t or won’t receive HTML, they still get the URLs exposed.
Brilliant. This should be a plug-in for every blog package out there. I would gladly give up escaping into HTML within my RSS feeds if I could only find a way to send the hyperlinks without a whole lot of extra manual work on each post.
As an aside, I highly recommend looking at dotLRN as an alternative for a CMS. It’s a bit quirky, particularly in its choice of core technologies (AOLServer, Tcl, and PostgreSQL), but in certain aspects it is far ahead of every other CMS (Open Source or not) out there.
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