___S.P.B.___ | Evernotes | WordPress*3 | PowerPoint | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Information belongs to ... | YOU | app | app | app | ||
Web Friendly | YES | NO | YES | NO | ||
Standard/Non propietary format | YES | NO | NO | NO | ||
Zettlekasten friendly | YES | YES | NO | NO | ||
Needs a non-standard DDBB | NO*1 | YES | YES | NO | ||
Needs server maintenance | NO | NO | YES | NO | ||
git friendly (advanced distributed team collaboration and version control) | YES | NO | NO | NO | ||
works Offline | YES | YES | NO | YES | ||
Search by text | YES | YES | YES | NO | ||
Search by (N-dimensional) topics | YES | YES | YES | NO | ||
Search by unique-id | YES | NO | YES | NO | ||
Search by text and topic | YES | YES? | YES? | NO | ||
Search speed | FAST*1 | FAST | SLOW | N/A | ||
Save search as bookmark | YES | NO | YES | NO | ||
Proximity map | YES | NO | NO | NO | ||
Fast preview | YES | NO | NO | YES | ||
e-commerce/SEO plugins | NO | NO | YES | NO | ||
Intranet/Public Web | INTRA | INTRA | PUBLIC | NONE | ||
Zoom in/out Map view | YES | NO | NO | NO | ||
Print to book | YES | NO | YES? | NO | ||
Print sub-book | YES | NO | NO | NO | ||
WYSIWYG Interface | NO | YES | YES | YES | ||
Quick edit interface | YES*2 | NO | NO | NO | ||
*1 Your HTML file is your database. Content is indexed
and classified upon page load in real-time by the web browser
Javascript engine.
*2 Using your favourite HTML/text editor with support for macros, templates, auto-completion. *3 Similar results apply to other CMS like Confluence or SharePoint. *4 Modern web browsers load, index and classify a full book or site faster than the time it takes to load a single article from a remote CMS. This is due to the bottleneck in CMS central database when different users search for content in parallel saturating the resources. With the SPB approach, no pressure is put on any central database. All search is run in parallel on each client. |
Evernote (and others) are friendly visual apps targeting any type of user. Those apps use some form of proprietary database format to store the content and proprietary services to synchronize it.
On the other side SPB follows the philosophy that the storage format
must be as simple and safe as possible to be sure 10 years from now we
have zero problems to recover the information written inside or copy/export
it to a different device or platform.
The internal format of SPB is HTML (plain-text mixed with plain-text tags).
(It takes a couple of hours to master the basics of HTML, and then you can
use it for the rest of your life).
Even in the absence of a web-browser the documentation in an HTML SPB
project can be consulted with text editor like Notepad, vim, Ultraedit or
Word and transformed with easy to other formats.
This is how a "Notes on Java" SPB
looks like,
and this is how its corresponding text/HTML internal source format
looks like.
If some hardware error corrupts the HTML file, much of information can
still be recovered. This is mostly impossible with binary proprietary formats.
Editing content with HTML (vs WYSIWYG note-taking apps) is less friendly
for newcomers, but it's (much) faster once used to the minimal HTML syntax,
specially once we get used to some of the many powerful free and commercial
tools available on the wild. The acquired HTML knowledge gained while editing
SPB documentation, is also reusable in many other contexts like e-commerce,
or digital publishing.
Also by using standard HTML, SPB documents can also integrated with easy with any
other HTML content, for example, allowing to add to
business-charts,
auto-generated HTML reporting outputs, video content, ... .
This is not possible with proprietary tools/formats.
Since version 1.1 SPBs allows to create printed books (or sub-books) of the content, again by just profiting from standard (CSS) technology in modern browsers.
HTML formats allows also to share the information as e-mail or chat attachments,
or integrate into distributed (high-tolerant to hardware&network failures)
version control systems like Git for collaborative, distributed and offline work.
This is not possible with proprietary tools/formats.
Probably "normal" users will be happy enough with apps like Evernote, but once they want something more "advanced" and gain control, they will prefer the power of standard Web technologies like SPB.
Metaphorically speaking, if Power Point is an Apple Store of documentation
in Fifth Avenue where i-Phones are sold, the SPB is the Apple
factory in Asia where document information is stored, assembled and tested.