[Pmwiki-users] Feature Suggestion

[Jonathan Scott Duff]

On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 04:10:38PM -0600, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> To avoid the "line oriented" markup that Scott proposed, I'd counter-propose
> markups such as:
> 
>    [%Abbrev0 http://www.replacement.org/url/prefix0%]
>    [%Abbrev1 http://www.replacement.org/url/prefix1%]
> 
>    =intermap Abbrev0 http://www.replacement.org/url/prefix0
>    =intermap Abbrev1 http://www.replacement.org/url/prefix1
> 
> or something along these lines.  

That first one works for me.

> I think this can probably be handled 
> as a local customization w/o modifying pmwiki.php, although it
> may require some tricky handling of the $LinkPatterns array to make
> sure the patterns stay in the correct sequence.

Why not modify pmwiki.php and keep intermap.txt in the same format?

> For shortcuts:
> 
> On a similar thought, and starting down a very slippery slope that
> I've been quite reluctant to examine, does PmWiki need author-defined 
> generic abbreviation capabilities?  (Perhaps this is what Scott
> meant by "shortcuts"?)  

Yes.

> While writing the documentation
> trail pages and other pages I've sometimes found myself wishing to be 
> able to simply write something like [%trail%] and have that be 
> automatically converted to %trail%<<|PmWiki.DocumentationIndex|>>, 

Heh, I was looking at those pages today and wishing that exact thing.

> but not have to hard-code this as a local customization to PmWiki.
> I.e., enable full-text shortcuts to be defined within a wiki page such as 
> PmWiki.GroupHeader (as opposed to just intermap shortcuts 
> But I'm *very* worried that this "macro" capability will be just the 
> beginning of a very slippery slope that will ultimately lead to the 
> exclusion of naive authors--i.e., in addition to learning the 
> TextFormattingRules, they'd also have to be aware of all of the 
> author-defined custom markups that were generated.

Hmm. Are you worried that they'll see the funny markup and wonder
"what's this?" Are you worried that they won't be able to find an
answer? What do you mean by "they'd have to be aware of all
shortcuts"?

-Scott
-- 
Jonathan Scott Duff
duff at cbi.tamucc.edu