[pmwiki-users] EditGettingStarted (was: TextFormattingRules and BasicEditing)

John Rankin john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
Tue Mar 7 21:20:40 CST 2006


On Wednesday, 8 March 2006 3:14 PM, Neil Herber <nospam at eton.ca> wrote:
>At 2006-03-08  02:57 PM +1300, John Rankin is rumored to have said:
>> >I like the page, but thought that lists and paragraphs needed to be
>> >separated. Changed.
>>
>>Could you explain why?
>
>Sure,
>
>1) Because the single most common word processing package is MS Word, 
>and in the Word "Format" menu, there are several choices starting 
>with "Font...", "Paragraph...", and  "Bullets and Numbering...". 
>Lists seemed like a better name than "Bullets and
>Numbering...".
>
>2) I doubt that any new user thinks of a list as a collection of 
>paragraphs. They think of it as a series of lines.
>
>3) Your instructions for creating paragraphs says to press "enter" 
>twice. But that is not true for most lists, so calling the lines of a 
>list paragraphs just seems wrong.
>
>4) If I were doing a search for how to create a list, I would *not* 
>look for "paragraph". I would look for "lists" or "bullets" or 
>"bullet(ed) lists" or "numbered lists.
>
>5) Although it doesn't matter a whit to most authors, the actual HTML 
>markup is "list" markup. Not that the names of HTML entities should 
>govern PmWiki, but it doe let me add anothe list item.  ;-)
>
>
I agree with some of these and find others less relevant. What
it has highlighted for me is the central wiki concept of 
"start of line markup". What I had called "Paragraphs" is "text
that has a special character at the start of the line". I think
that's a key idea we should communicate in Getting Started.

Have another look at the reworked version.
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/EditGettingStarted

Before anyone says 

  If I were doing a search for how to create a list, I would *not* 
  look for "line markup"

It's irrelevant; detailed information is on another page; 
the purpose of GettingStarted is to learn that you use
start-of-line markup to do stuff. Although searching for
list will return EditGettingStarted as a hit.

Comments?

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin






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