[Pmwiki-users] Re: beginners fight

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 06:46:35AM -0400, Crisses wrote:
> >I added two examples here:
> >	http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/LineContinuation
> >they should clarify the difference between '\' and '\\'
> 
> I don't think the problem here is *how* to use the syntax, but WHY 
> that's the syntax.

I think the clarification is useful.  As to WHY PmWiki treats linebreaks
the way it does--there are a number of reasons...

1.  Much, if not most, of PmWiki's markup was designed in 2001 based
on principles evident in the original wiki (http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki)
and described in the book "The Wiki Way".  So, whenever it came to an
issue of markup, such as how to treat linebreaks, I tended to follow the
guidelines in "The Wiki Way" when I didn't have some stronger reason to
do differently.

2.  Over the years, opinion has been just about evenly split about whether
newlines should be treated as <br /> or text should be folded across
newlines.  What's "intuitive" to one person seems wrong to the next.

3.  Almost every major wiki system I've seen (Wikipedia, UseMod, OddMuse,
PhpWiki, etc.) uses the same interpretation that PmWiki does -- namely,
text separated by a single newline is joined to form a single paragraph.


So, for these reasons, I've stuck with PmWiki's existing interpretation
of newlines.  Early in PmWiki's development there was an occasional need
to join text appearing on two separate lines, since this was occasional
I simply adopted the programmer's convention of ending a line with a
backslash.  Yes, it's true that conventions common in programming are
often unintuitive to non-programmers.  OTOH, if there's not something
that is instantly more recognizable to non-programmers, then I
think it makes sense to go ahead and at least follow an existing
convention.  Put another way:  just because something is used by 
programmers shouldn't automatically disqualify it for consideration. :-)

The use of multiple backslashes at the end of a line to generate line 
breaks was introduced in PmWiki 0.6, because (1) everyone, including me,
thoroughly hated the [[<<]] markup, and (2) after a LOT of discussion
and debate, it was the best that anyone could come up with.  It has the
advantage of being easy to write, and it keeps the markup text looking
at least *something* like the rendered output.  

Pm