[Pmwiki-users] right and center alignment

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sun, Feb 08, 2004 at 08:02:02AM -0800, Steven Leite wrote:
> 
> Forcing our naive authors to learn this (proprietary) markup, it just
> doesn't seem right.  I think IF we are going to teach people markup specific
> to PmWiki, then we might as well use existing HTML markup, or something that
> RESEMBLES HTML.

Actually, I've always taken the position that this is a slippery-slope
sort of argument and heavily resisted starting down that slope.  First,
HTML is really ugly, and it interferes with the normal reading of the text.  
Second, once the gate is open to add "just a few tags", the pressure 
increases from many authors/users to enable more and more HTML tags 
until pretty soon everyone is having to look through a lot of 
angle-brackets to figure out what's happening, and those who don't 
know HTML are overwhelmed/turned off by it).  The problem is that 
markup containing HTML, even simple sequences, will tend to alienate
those who aren't familiar with it.

If we introduce "special" tags that look like HTML but really aren't,
we're doing many naive authors a disservice by fooling them into writing
something that looks like HTML but really isn't.  If we allow some HTML
tags but disallow others, we frustrate experts and naive authors alike,
because they have no clear way of knowing if the <tag>something</tag>
they just entered isn't working because they did something wrong or
it's just not supported by the wiki.

Other problems with open/closing tags in markup:
  1. What to do when users forget closing tags, especially if tags
     otherwise nest
  2. How to detect/correct incorrectly nested tags and turn them
     into legal (X)HTML  (e.g., <b><i>text</b></i>)

So, I'm continuing to avoid the use of HTML-like sequences in the markup
until the benefits clearly outweigh some of the costs.

Pm