Welcome to webOutliner

What is webOutliner ?

webOutliner is a browser based outliner: it brings the power of outlining to your users/customers' Web publishing experience.

Outlines are structured documents, primarily text, organized in a tree-like hierarchy of paragraphs.

Their most distinctive advantage over plain text is the small wedge - usually a triangular symbol - that appears on the left of most paragraphs (or nodes) : clicking it reveals (expands) or hides (collapses) the underlying content of the paragraph.

Thanks to an interesting property of outlines pioneered by Dave Winer, the embedded content doesn't need to reside in the same document as the containing paragraph.

Learn more about outline inclusion by clicking the up-arrow wedge on the left of this paragraph.

This gives the author a way of providing readers with several layers of relevance in the same document: the initial display usually gives a synthetic view, drilling down by 'expanding' or 'including' relevant paragraphs progressively reveals more detailed information.

Writing in webOutliner, one can create and edit outlines directly in the Web browser, saving the result in several text formats on the service one is currently browsing.

Outlines are returned to the server as tab indented plain text, OPML format XML text, and Dynamic HTML.

webOutliner is provided as an AJAX package. Its functions and interface are completely client based. It can be served from any HTTP server, running any Web programming environment.

webOutliner has already been successfully deployed from Apache+PHP, Python + CherryPy, Frontier and Witango servers.

webOutliner development started back in 2002: we made sure the outliner works in most modern Web browsers.

webOutliner is constantly tested with Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 for Windows and Apple Safari 2 for MacOS X.

Other W3C standards compliant browsers should work as well, Gecko based browsers certainly do. But we have a hard enough time testing against the 3 most popular ones, so users of Opera, Konqueror and their cohorts are on their own.

iJot: webOutliner's demo service.

You are invited to test drive webOutliner by creating and modifying documents on the demo site provided by iJot.

Or you may open a free iJot account and start publishing your outlines - including an outlined weblog - at http://account.ijot.net/.

Licensing webOutliner.

Corporate licenses of webOutliner are available for $990.00 per year per host.

Academic licenses are $490.00 per year per host. Multi-hosts discounts are available.

The license covers detailed deployment instructions, as well as one year of product updates, email and IM support.

We offer consulting services for specific feature development and installation assistance, billed on a $120.00 per hour basis.

Licenses are not (yet) available for online purchase. Please email all orders / enquiries to orders [at] weboutliner.com

Getting support.

Please ask us any question about webOutliner using the iJot contact page.

You may also visit or subscribe to the wo-support

and ijot-support

groups / mailing lists / rss feeds.

We provide support to webOutliner licensees through specific email and IM channels.