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In the history of electronical information organization systems there have been essentially two popular approaches:
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Data is organized into trees, which itself have other trees as children. Every item appears only once in the structure. This is a very strict and unflexible way to organize information, and inherits limitations of the physical world.
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Systems that use hierarchies are for example file systems (without hard links) or outliners.
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Every item is autonomous and connected to other items by the use of links. This is a very flexible way to organization, which again is problematic since networks like these often tend to lack any structure, red threads and appear like a mess.
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Systems with chaotic structure are the Web, Wikis and most other hypertext systems.
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Clearly, there appears a chance to unify both worlds.
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However, this turns out a lot harder than one may think.
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Enid, my system that aims to fuse above concepts, came in the glimpse of a moment after thinking off and on about these things for roughly three years.
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The smallest addressible unit of information in Enid is called an "entry". It consists of:
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a title
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content, which is one or more
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children, which are entries indented two spaces deeper
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All of these items are optional.
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Links are written as {item to link to} in Enid, paragraphs need to be seperated by empty lines.
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After Enid parsed all the entries, the system resolves all links and replaces them with the appropriate content.
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A nice thing about Enid is that table of contents are easily represented as a big outline of links, separated from the contents. Restructuring and refactoring suddenly becomes very easy.
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Feeds for subscription can easily be created from Enid by creating an entry with links to the recently changed/relevant entries.
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Tags are lists of links to entries that should be tagged.
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