[Pmwiki-users] Re: Need help with markup

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote:

> How about an "escape" mechanism that will allow the user to use
> arbitrary HTML.  Something like this:

I'm still strongly opposed to the idea of allowing arbitrary HTML
in pages.  The main problem is that authors who know HTML will start using
it in lots of pages, discouraging authors who aren't comfortable with HTML
from editing it.  It's against the "author-friendly" nature of PmWiki.

For example, when I'm demonstrating PmWiki to new (potential) users,
and I go to "Edit Page" and they see that the text is something they
can read and easily understand, then they're more inclined to participate.
If I show them a page that has lots of markup in it--such that it's
difficult to separate the text from the markup--then they are very
unlikely to participate.

> Since this would be an "advanced" feature for PmWiki users, they
> shoudl be informed of the risks they take.

What about the "non-advanced" PmWiki user who wants to edit a page
that an "advanced" PmWiki user has put lots of HTML in?  Are (should)
they be informed of the risks they take?  I fear that many editors
will simply avoid the risks and not contribute, which is against the
PmWikiPhilosophy.

> > As opposed to using HTML directly, I can invent my own table markup that 
> > converts in an HTML-safe manner.  
> 
> I like this idea greatly ...
> 
> > For example, if the tag "[[tablerow]]" 
> > means start a cell in a new row and "[[tablecol]]" means start a 
> > new column in the current row, then:
> > 
> > 	[[tablestart border='1']]
> > 	[[tablerow]]
> > 	Here is some PmWiki text.
> > 	* Bullet lists okay
> > 	* Still okay
> > 	[[tablecol align='right']]
> > 	Here is a second cell, the text here is right aligned.
> > 	[[tableend]]
> 
> But I'm not too keen on the proposed syntax.  Why not take an idea
> from POD and make any line that starts with an = do something
> table-special?

Oh, I wasn't necessarily going to make it line oriented--I was going to
leave it inline-able.  I.e., the [[tablerow]] wouldn't have to appear
at the beginning of a line--it could appear in the middle of a line.  
I chose the double brackets just because they are already being used to 
mean "things out of the ordinary" (e.g., [[noheader]] [[spacewikiwords]]) 
and I didn't necessarily want to introduce a new markup character 
sequence altogether.

Although using the = at the beginning of a line might be a very useful
syntax for some of this stuff--I'll keep it in mind.

There are some other specialized markups that I've been wanting to
create and since the double brackets are already the canonical markers
for other specialized markups I thought I'd just continue using those.

Pm