Tiddling around

I’ve been playing around a little lately with TiddlyWiki to manage things like todo lists and project planning. I know lots of people who have been playing around with it, and I was prepared to love it, especilly given it’s vaguely dirty-sounding name, and on the surface, it’s a great idea: self-contained document management that can be run anywhere there’s a web browser. As a proof-of-concept, I like it, too: JavaScript that’s useful instead of simply annoying and processor burning. Revolutionary! Maybe AJAX has a future in something other than headache inducement…

At the end of the day, though, I can’t bring myself to like–or more importanly, trust–it. I know Andrew Hume said “programs that write programs are the happiest progams,” but I find the idea of TiddlyWiki fundamentally terrifying. I have a deep-seated belief in abstraction and separation or process, and, when it comes to dynamic HTML, templates. I want function libraries, modules; css in it’s own file and JavaScript in its own directory. Call me paranoid or old fashioned–go ahead, I’ve been called worse–but a 4500-line mangled mess of HTML, CSS and JavaScript that re-writes its own code on the fly and then wants to stick my precious data randomly into the mix? No thanks. It’s like a big, heaping helping of scripting scrapple.

I know, I know; the DOM is supposed to make this sort of thing safe. Anything with a tag can be accessed as a unique object, and the fluff code to makes objects zoom open like the Apple genie effect isn’t going to overwrite my meeting notes (on second thought, that might not be such a bad thing), but I still can’t bring myself to trust anything valuable to this monster JavaScript script masquerading as HTML masquerading as XML being processed by Firefox’s JS interpreter. If I had a penny for every time nslXPC has coughed up a hairball, I’d be rich. And if I take it with me somewhere and have to trust IE’s JavaScript/ECMAScript/KillMeNowScript implementation to DTRT…I’m better off with note cards.