mirror of
https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5
synced 2024-11-19 00:04:51 +00:00
29 lines
2.2 KiB
Plaintext
29 lines
2.2 KiB
Plaintext
title: TiddlyWikiArchitecture
|
|
modifier: JeremyRuston
|
|
tags: docs internals
|
|
|
|
!! Overview
|
|
|
|
The heart of TiddlyWiki can be seen as an extensible representation transformation engine. Given the text of a tiddler and its associated ContentType, the engine can produce a rendering of the tiddler in a new ContentType. Furthermore, it can efficiently selectively update the rendering to track any changes in the tiddler or its dependents.
|
|
|
|
The most important transformations are from `text/x-tiddlywiki` wikitext into `text/html` or `text/plain` but the engine is used throughout the system for other transformations, such as converting images for display in HTML, sanitising fragments of JavaScript, and processing CSS.
|
|
|
|
The key feature of wikitext is the ability to include one tiddler within another (usually referred to as //transclusion//). For example, one could have a tiddler called //Disclaimer// that contains the boilerplate of a legal disclaimer, and then include it within lots of different tiddlers with the macro call `<<tiddler Disclaimer>>`. This simple feature brings great power in terms of encapsulating and reusing content, and evolving a clean, usable implementation architecture to support it efficiently is a key objective of the TiddlyWiki5 design.
|
|
|
|
It turns out that the transclusion capability combined with the selective refreshing mechanism provides a good foundation for building TiddlyWiki's user interface itself. Consider, for example, the StoryMacro in its simplest form:
|
|
|
|
{{{
|
|
<<story story:MyStoryTiddler>>
|
|
}}}
|
|
|
|
The story macro looks for a list of tiddler titles in the tiddler `MyStoryTiddler`, and displays them in sequence. The subtle part is that subsequently, if `MyStoryTiddler` changes, the `<<story>>` macro is selectively re-rendered. So, to navigate to a new tiddler, code merely needs to add the name of the tiddler and a line break to the top of `MyStoryTiddler`:
|
|
|
|
{{{
|
|
var storyTiddler = store.getTiddler("MyStoryTiddler");
|
|
store.addTiddler(new Tiddler(storyTiddler,{text: navigateTo + "\n" + storyTiddler.text}));
|
|
}}}
|
|
|
|
The mechanisms that allow all of this to work are fairly intricate. The sections below progressively build the key architectural concepts of TiddlyWiki5 in a way that should provide a good basis for exploring the code directly.
|
|
|
|
|