[pmwiki-users] <div> markup suggestions...?

[John Rankin]

On Tuesday, 1 March 2005 9:59 AM, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
>In the very near future I'm planning to add a (:div:) markup,
>analogous to the (:table:) markup, that will create <div> elements
>in the page output.  An author can supply arguments to the markup,
>as in (:div id='menu':) or (:div class='Pm':).
>
>However, it occurs to me that we'll quickly find cases where
>(:div class='xyz':) deserves its own markup sequence.  For example,
>instead of writing
>
>   (:div class='Pm':)
>   Here's a lot of stuff written by Pm, including
>   * some
>   * embedded
>   * list
>   * items
>   (:divend:)
>
>it would be nice to be able to have some character sequence that
>is a shorter version of the above.  For sake of an example, assume
>the sequence is two tildes at the beginning of a line...:
>
>   ~~Pm
>   Here's a lot of stuff written by Pm, including
>   * some
>   * embedded
>   * list
>   * items
>   ~~
>
>Anyone have any suggestions for appropriate markup for this?
>
I have a suggestion and a request...

a. by analogy with % markup and noting that / means division,
   what about

   /Pm/
   Here's a lot of stuff written by Pm, including
   * some
   * embedded
   * list
   * items
   //

  to mean <div class='Pm'> ... </div>

  Maybe

    /#Pm/

  means <div id='Pm'>

b. We are starting to encounter a problem with the wiki -> pdf
   converter and the ever-expanding list of markup rules.

   The approach we have taken is to use the pmwiki engine to
   convert wiki markup to an intermediate xml dtd first, then
   convert that to LaTeX and use pdflatex to create a pdf.

   The problem is that we have no way to catch unexpected
   markup sequences, which then get translated into xhtml.
   This problem will probably get worse over time and may
   become a show-stopper.

   We'd like to be able to say to PmWiki:
   - we are generating output to the xyz dtd
   - if you find any markup translations for xhtml,
     replace <.*?> output with '' (for example)
   - tell us about any xhtml you find

   One solution might be if we could put a 5th
   parameter on the Markup function to specify the
   dtd. It would also be useful if we could reuse
   the 2nd (sequence) and 3rd (matching rule)
   parameters, without having to recode them.

   Any thoughts?
-- 
JR
--
John Rankin