[pmwiki-users] Customizable Access-Keys

Nils Knappmeier nk at knappi.org
Tue Mar 22 16:16:36 CST 2005


Richard Burnett wrote:

> What if you based the user-definable keys on the author name and have 
> the settings stored on the server instead?  I imagine this would still 
> require a cookie, but here you could just

> use some userid, and have that affect some dynamically loaded code for 
> the key bindings?  This of course would require you to maybe set your 
> preferences at a particular site,

> however, I can't see how that would be bad.  Not every site might have 
> the same commands, since people are prone to customization (just as 
> what we are trying to do here).
>
> Just a thought.

1) My original idea was to define the keys once and then use them on 
_every_ PmWiki-Installation. The commands I had in mind are commands 
that every installation should support in the same way. Well, "should" 
doesn't mean "does", but still: Editing GroupHeader, GroupFooter, 
current page and SideBar should work the same on most PmWiki 
installations. That's why the URL. However, Patrick mentioned to me that 
it might be better to have a simple way of copying preferences from one 
wiki to another, than to store them externally.
2) I don't like unique ids. Too many pages store unique ids as a cookie 
and too many users just accept it. Especially, advertisement pages. 
Storing unique ids in a cookie means that you are able to track users. 
It means, that the user doesn't know what data I'm collecting about him. 
When google stores a cookie on my browser, in theory, they can create a 
record about what I'm looking for in the web. And as soon as I log in to 
my gmail account, they can relate the id in the cookie to my person. 
Then it's not "someone" looking for this and that, but "Nils Knappmeier" 
is looking to this again. The author name in PmWiki is not necessarily 
unique. Everybody could just enter the same name when editing a page. 
And, as far as I'm concerned, people should say: "I want to use a 
certain set of preferences" rather than "I'm Nils Knappmeier, please 
load my personal preferences". Besides, it allows users to just use the 
preferences defined by someone else, if they like it.


Nils





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