[pmwiki-users] floating box on the right

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Wed Mar 23 20:59:15 CST 2005


On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 02:14:09PM +1200, John Rankin wrote:
> Um, yes and no... (btw {=stick notes=} of course allow wiki markup)

Oh yes, of course.  I suspect that (:note ... :) does not.

> Well if it were up to me, whenever pmwiki gains a new semantic
> style, such as %stickynote%, we'd define an alternate semantic
> markup, like {=sticky note=}.  

Interesting, because this seems to be exactly the opposite of
what Christian asks for (every time we define a new semantic markup,
we also have a text-based form of it).   :-)

I worry that we eventually run out of semantic markups (or they
become too overwhelming to learn), at some point it's nicer to
just put things in words with some common syntax.

The name "wiki style" may indeed be a misnomer, but it's what I
came up with at the time -- before CSS was widely available.  And
I've always tended to think of WikiStyles more in terms of semantics 
than presentation, thus %Pm%, %note%, %stickynote%, etc.  But your
points are well taken.

In terms of wiki->TeX->pdf, the handling of wikistyles isn't nearly 
as complex as it might seem from the current implementation -- it's 
just an array of simple name=value pairs.  The complexity comes in 
mapping those pairs onto the irregular assortment of HTML attributes 
and CSS properties that are imposed upon us by the current standards.

> - to do casual styling of text
> - to extend wiki markup and add new meaning to page content,
>   which we happen to represent stylistically, rather than with
>   markup characters
> 
> So what about introducing a new markup for the latter semantic
> purpose?

I'm not opposed, but I am concerned about the markup learning
curve.  And I know that in our population of authors there are some
who will want to think and write presentationally no matter what we do, 
so PmWiki ought to support that while providing an easy path to
reformulate their writings into semantically-defined equivalents.  
(The idea, perhaps poorly formulated, is that an author will 
eventually get tired of writing %color=navy border-top="1px dashed" 
border-bottom="1px dashed"% some text %% and want to figure out 
how to write and define %stickynote% instead.  And at that
point our markup is far more semantic than presentational, at least 
to the level of what can be reasonably done with XHTML/CSS.)

It certainly would not be too difficult to simply add another
wikistyle attribute that indicates the semantic meaning of a 
particular style (and thereby be usefully used in translating
text delimited by the wikistyle to something other than HTML).

Pm



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