Sparrow
What is Sparrow? (Via Scripting News
Sparrow at a brief glance looks to be an tools for editing pages over the Internet, in one's browser, using various forms. Sound familiar? (The document editing features are just one bit of Conversant, as part of the Conversant CMS application suite. For those who aren't tired of hearing me say it, Conversant can be used to build just any old Internet application one would want to build. Really. The "Buy Mark a Pony" plugin is coming soon.
Really.)
The interesting concept (and limitation) of Sparrow looks to be its focus on structured documents. The demo site makes it clear that editing a Sparrow page consists of editing multiple forms on one page. (If you don't want the hassle of signing up--I didn't--the examples in the Contributor's Guide are instructive.) So a To-Do list is built out of multiple editing forms on the page, and a group would presumably have each person add to a bit of the page by filling out one form. I find it most interesting how they put each form right at the location where the final edited or new item will be.
This is standard outlining, which is encouraged in my new toy Radio Userland and is a pretty common feature of modern word processors. Making an outline can also really, really, really help make the final piece of writing easier to understand. Believe one who has spent several days writing some very simple docs for his day job. (Heard recently in my office: "How am I going to get everything I know about teamwork into a bunch of bullet points!" Fortunately, they know to just ignore me until the rant winds down.)
I called this a limitation of Sparrow, but it's a limitation with teeth. How we write is often dictated by the tools we use. I dump a rambling bit like this into a big form on the Dreamzone page, which is still smaller than a full sized page. Sparrow monkeys with that more by insisting that one must, must also pay attention to what is said before, and what will be said after, and how that all flows. *Very* interesting, indeed.
(And, as the Conversant Evangelist, I must mention that this type of forced structure is possible with Conversant. I swear, I could become a monk and spend my life writing really cool Page Themes for specialized purposes. Well, as soon as I found somewhere on Earth where Aradia wouldn't hunt me down and smack me silly for being on the computer all the time. But I digress. I don't know how I'd mimic the Sparrow dropdown arrow thing.)
There is some permissioning, and whatever the heck Docushare is lurks under the hood to share documents and share settings (like the aforementioned Page Themes allow in Conversant). Not a bad run at the problem by Xerox PARC.
