[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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