WikiWords are an Ugly Hack
Posted in Information related, Software, Pseudo Psychology, Evolution, Wiki on March 8th, 2006I have come to think that WikiWords are an Ugly hack because they:
- are not intuitive (especially to non programmers who haven’t used camel case)
- are hard to read ( what’s better, “BasicEnglishLessons” or “Basic English Lessons” )
- force weird behaviour when things don’t fit (CeeLanguage for “C Language” or acronym hacking)
By the time you’ve shoehorned your words into an unreadable WikiWord, you could have marked it another way. In the early days, when Ward created Wiki this seemed like a logical simple way to do things. Nowadays I think most wikis support some form of marked up naming
e.g. [[My Long Example]] resulting visually with ‘My Long Example’
instead of
MyLongExample
Which I think is much more readable. Whitespace exists for a reason, breaking up words into readable chunks of information.
At work, we use DokuWiki for some internal documentation. It has the facility to use WikiWords, but we use the annotated form e.g. [[Secret Project]]. This seems to be acceptable for most people, and even when we were supporting WikiWords (a different wiki), people started using the non camel case linking syntax anyway. Which suggested to me people wanted something easier to read.
I guess it comes down to personal preference, some programmers may like the CamelCase WikiWords, and maybe it doesn’t bother other users once they’ve learnt it. In my upcoming “will I ever release it wiki engine” Evolution, I haven’t bothered to implement WikiWords, but that is my preference. We’ll see if that feature makes it in .. it’s an ugly hack, but quick.