[pmwiki-users] leading spaces switch for 2.2.0 (somewhat important)

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Sun Mar 25 14:34:52 CDT 2007


On Sun, Mar 25, 2007 at 10:48:26AM +0100, marc wrote:
> Tegan Dowling said...
> > On 3/24/07, marc <gmane at auxbuss.com> wrote:
> > > I fail to understand the difficulty
> > > it seems to cause; I haven't encountered anyone who couldn't deal with
> > > the syntax once understood - a one sentence, one time thing - no
> > > different to '' for emphasis, etc.
> > [...]  Whenever the trainees or the
> > secondary, tertiary, etc users encounter a situation in which the
> > plain, unadorned text they enter (or paste in) fails to provide the
> > output they (reasonably, based on their experience with Notepad)
> > expect, we run the risk of having them declare that wikis are just too
> > damned hard to for them to be asked to work with.
> 
> With respect, dumbing down features to meet the inability of folk to 
> adapt is not a road that I wish to travel.
> 
> The feature in question requires as trivial a piece of knowledge to 
> circumvent as is possible - one leading space; I would suggest that folk 
> who can't cope with that syntax are going to struggle mightily with 
> almost all other wiki syntax.

I don't think that we're "dumbing down" the markup, or that people
cannot cope with the leading space markup.  As you say, the authors
I've dealt with have no problem understanding the problem once it's
explained to them.

I'd like to avoid the need for the explanation -- especially because
the outcome is extremely disproportionate to the cause.  Most authors'
first encounter with the leading space rule comes from entering
a line of text with a leading space, which then results in the page
being rendered extremely wide (with a horizontal scrollbar).  Worse,
it's not just the one line of text that is wide, but *all* of the lines
(including those without spaces) appear wide.  Nothing about this
suggests "preformatted text" is causing the problem, all that an
author sees is that the page has suddenly become very wide, and it's
not obvious why.  (The change to a monospace font is too subtle to
be obvious.)

It's even less obvious that something as small as a single leading
space is the problem.  When we explain the reason for the long lines
to authors, it somewhat makes sense, but at the same time this feels
to them like this is a "programmer's feature" and so perhaps the wiki
really isn't for them.

I'd like to avoid that.  So, changing the default to leave leading
spaces along matches what most authors expect, while there are other 
explicit mechanisms for obtaining preformatted text, and a site
administrator can change the default to what we have now.

I can even set it up so that we have a directive similar to
(:linebreaks:)/(:nolinebreaks:), so that individual pages can
change the default for the page (or for sections of the page).

> To me, this is a solution looking for a problem. I'm completely 
> unconvinced that the change is necessary.

Fair enough.  I've had a lot of experience with people being
confused by the leading whitespace rule, and confusion is
often an indication that a change is necessary.

Thanks!

Pm



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