[Pmwiki-users] Re: markup musings - notation idea

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Sat May 22 08:22:44 CDT 2004


On Sat, May 22, 2004 at 01:15:04PM +0200, Christian Ridderstr?m wrote:
> On Fri, 21 May 2004, John Feezell wrote:
> 
> Just for comparison, I've written the examples below using '->'. 

The thing I don't like about -> is that the most common form of
link should be a plain link to another wiki page, as in 

   [[free link]]

Somehow it seems weird to me that if I want to substitute a different 
text for the link--a less common operation in a site that has useful
page titles--that I then put the text before the target instead of after
it.  But perhaps this is just a feature of the cognitive model for links
I've been using, when perhaps the real model should be that the
common case is

   [[link text]]

such that the [[...]] always denotes the text to be used in the link,
and then the -> or other notation says where the link should go if it's
someplace different than where the link text would naturally take it.

Unfortunately, I think that this second model would confuse people who
are already used to the web.  When creating a link, my natural inclination
is to first decide/specify "where I am linking to" and not 
"what should the link text be".  Thus I feel the target should go first.

One can then say to reverse the arrow direction and use 
[[target <- link text]], but this likewise confuses me at first
glance because "<-" implies to me a "going backward", when in 
reality the link is taking someone "forward" to another location.  

In general, the cognitive model I think I use is "I want to create
a link (i.e., [[...]]) to a target and sometimes specify some other
text for that link."  Contrast this with "I want to create a link
with this text and sometimes go to a different target."  

I think that part of the reason this works is that in the wiki, 
unlike in HTML <a ...> tags, the target of the link can actually 
be a useful component of a sentence or other phrase.

Pm



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