[Pmwiki-users] intuitive learning

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Tue Feb 24 15:12:52 CST 2004


On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 03:43:29PM -0500, Lloyd Budd wrote:
> 
> I am wondering if many people customize PmWiki:EditQuickReference much 
> ?  Just getting started, and it does not seem well laid out, or include 
> the items that I am finding myself trying to remember again and again.  
> Possibly, this would be a good item to work on together.

Feel free to modify the EditQuickReference page on pmichaud.com--if
I generally agree with any changes made then they'll automatically make it 
into the next release.   The current EditQuickReference page is mostly
based on something I threw together a long time ago.

> Before I consider that issue, I am wondering if I am missing something 
> conceptually between the differences of {{ }} and [[ ]] :
> 	A {{free link}}  suggests to me that an external link might look 
> 	like {{http://www.pmichaud.com PM}} , nope.
> 	An [[http://www.pmichaud.com external link]] suggests to me [[free 
> link]], nope.
> I think what I have presented is a usual "mental model".  Was this a 
> design decision, an implementation detail, or something else?

Mostly an implementation detail.  Before we had free links we had already
developed the [[<linkref> <text>]] syntax, so to maintain compatibility
we used {{...}} to denote free links.  Also it was felt that {{free link}}
was less obtrusive to reading (markup) text than using square brackets.

> Eureka!  I understand now. If {{free link}} did not have unique syntax 
> , additional analysis of the lexicons would be required.

Indeed, and they really do mean different things...

[[PmWiki text]]  
   links to a page named "PmWiki" and displays as "text"
{{PmWiki text}}  
   links to a page named "PmWikiText" and displays as "PmWiki text"

So there has to be some sort of syntax to indicate which meaning
is intended.

Pm



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