[pmwiki-users] Wikiwords

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Fri Jan 19 18:43:07 CST 2007


Lately I've been giving serious thought to turning
off all wikiword parsing by default in the core, and
would like feedback.

Here's the background and history.  Prior to version 2.1,
PmWiki had wikiwords enabled in the core by default,
such that any CamelCase word would be automatically
treated as a link to another page.  There was an
option to disable wikiword linking, however.

Starting with version 2.1, we switched the core
default so that wikiwords would not automatically
be treated as links to other pages.  Sites that wanted
to have wikiword links enabled simply set

    $LinkWikiWords = 1;

However, even for sites that don't enable wikiword links,
PmWiki still parses wikiwords in the source markup, and 
surrounds them with <span class='wikiword'>...</span> in 
the output.  This is intended to make it easier for sites
to find older wikiword links that may no longer work
when $LinkWikiWords is turned off.

Unfortunately, this additional parsing and output step
sometimes interferes with wikiwords that naturally
occur in other instances (e.g., character entities
such as "&AElig;" or colors such as "#FFFF00").  Since
most site generally don't visually distinguish wikiwords
from surrounding text, it's not at all obvious what is
happening.

So, I'm thinking that now would be a good time to have
all wikiword parsing disabled by default in the core.
For sites that are still using wikiword links, the
$LinkWikiWords = 1; setting would still enable wikiword
parsing and linking, same as it does now.  Sites that
want exactly the current 2.1 behavior, where wikiwords
are parsed and tagged but not linked, would do:

    $LinkWikiWords = 0;
    include_once("$FarmD/scripts/wikiwords.php");

Defaulting PmWiki to not parsing wikiwords by default
would clean up a number of confusing issues for authors,
as well as potentially reduce the time needed to render
pages (the markup rule used to find/process wikiword
links can be a little slow, and not needed for sites that
aren't doing anything with wikiwords).

Any comments, either for, against, or otherwise?

Thanks,

Pm




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