[pmwiki-users] want opinions on a new cookbook recipe format

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 04:13:57PM -0600, Chris Cox wrote:
> > And since I'm eventually hoping to extend this concept to allow
> > field-based searching of pages, it's probably better to prototype
> > the cookbook this way.  If we later decide a directive-based form
> > is better, it'll be no problem for me to write a script that converts
> > them all at once.
> 
> That's cool.. I was just thinking about enforcement, it's kinda
> loose right now.  I mean you can pretty much format things however
> you want right now... right?

Sure, but I think looseness is generally a good thing.  With looseness
we're able to handle "exceptions" much more easily, and by design the 
Cookbook is all about making PmWiki do "exceptional" things (in both 
senses of the word :-).

Indeed, the whole concept of a wiki is often to not enforce things
into a particular structure.  :-)

> With a directive (or possibly some other kind of technique) we
> could give a commonness to the look and feel and if combined
> with some class= (div or whatever) we could allow skin producers
> to match things up a bit to their own look.

Well, we can already give them a class by defining it in the
 >>recipeinfo<< wikistyle (now done), and with a slight change
to my Markup() definition (also done) it's now producing the results as:

  <div class='recipeinfo>
    <div class='property-Summary'>Summary: ...</div>
    <div class='property-Status'>Status: ...</div>
    <div class='property-Maintainer'>Maintainer: ...</div>
  </div>

This is a pretty good amount of structure to be hanging styling
on.  Of course, we can easily add more spans and stuff to the output
to style it further, without having to change the format of the
markup used to produce it.  :-)

Pm