[Pmwiki-users] More on WikiTrail

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at sci.tamucc.edu
Wed Nov 6 16:42:48 CST 2002


On 7 Nov 2002, John Rankin wrote:
>Pm Writes:
>> Also, in converting T:stop to :stop:text, would we need to strip out 
>> the markup from the target page?  I would think so, but am curious as to
>> what you had in mind there...
> ----
> Up to a point, Minister. One reason wiki works is it brings "power through simplicity, simplicity through generality". 
> 
> If wiki add-in does its T:stop to :stop:text before the rest of the 
> page rendering happens, then I'd have thought it could cope with 
> most in-line mark-up, except perhaps [[include:wikiword]] 
> (which might reasonably be translated into wikiword). 

Actually, I'm thinking it will have trouble with the non-inline markup,
such as !, !!, *, :term:definition, etc.  And since many pages will begin
with headers (as opposed to just text), this may be a big concern.

> I see no reason to go down a slippery slope. Invoking the "generality" 
> clause, folk should only be able to do things with T:stop that they can 
> do with existing mark-up. Using your example of date/time of last 
> revision, according to BracketAbuse, [[$LastModified]] already provides 
> this feature. 

Except that (as you noted) [[$LastModified]] would translate to the
last modification date of the TrailPage, not the stop page.  So then
the T:stop --> :stop:text translation would really need to include a
list of markups that will be honored/suppressed in the excerpted text,
and I don't see a nice general rule for determining this.  Not suppressing
at least some of the markups will probably generate some interesting
surprises in the TrailPage.  Also, it may indirectly encourage authors to
compromise the layout of individual pages just to make sure they look good
in TrailPages (which might not be best overall).

I guess I'm seeing the excerpted-text concept of WikiTrails as being
application-specific enough that it's probably best to leave it to
each wiki administrator to decide how he/she wants to handle it for
their specific needs.  Hopefully the WikiTrail add-on script I'm preparing
will give enough clues about implementation that they can take it from there.

Pm





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