Aim Higher
Someone came up with a cool idea to add a universal edit button to make editing wikis easier. It adds a button like for RSS feeds that redirects the browser to the edit page. It’s clever but it aims way too low. If you can get browsers to add an editing button you have an opportunity to either point to an online form or a standalone application that could also edit the page. In other words, Atom Publishing Protocol auto-detection.
It would be a great shame if such a spec were limited to just redirecting to a HTML page or if it were thought of as a useful feature for wikis instead of a useful feature for the internet everywhere. Let’s face it, nearly every page on the internet can be edited by someone and I’m sure they’d appreciate it being easier to get there. Just look at the number of content management systems that provide some form of inline editing (heck RedDot renamed their company after the red dots that you clicked on inline to edit a section).
June 24th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Some other points I see: what do you do if the edit-URL is identical to the view-URL, because you are using PUT or POST to change the content? The mine-type is application/x-wiki, but that does not tell me what kind of editor I should expect, for instance if being able to edit the HTML directly, I think text/html would be a better mine-type. And rel=”alternate” means an alternate representation of the resource, not an action on the resource. (And I do not like the icon)
June 24th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Yeah, it has a fair way to go before it’s a useful standard, but the idea is very cool. The URL really needs to point to either an edit page (type=”text/html”) or a more complete descriptor file that can then describe the content types provided and accepted, the protocols used to publish etc.
And yes, the icon is awful but that’s easily fixed. :)