[Pmwiki-users] the descriptions of emphasis

[Jonathan Scott Duff]

On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 08:46:37AM -0700, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> It also preserves a nice symmetry that has developed 
> for the inline styles (John Rankin deserves the credit for this):
> 
>     '+big+'
>     '-small-'
>     '^superscript^'
>     '_subscript_'
>     '*bold*'
>     '/italic/'
>     '/*bold italic*/'
      '*/italic bold/*'				???
>     ''emphasis''
>     '''strong emphasis'''

slight stream of conciousness here ...

Are you proposing to make all of these work by default in pmwiki? And if
so, would '++bigger++' DWIM? Assuming so, there would seem to be some
minor cognitive difficulty. Does '///foo///' make "foo" more italic
(leaning ever farther towards the base line :)? Does '**foo**' make
"foo" more bold (though, there is some merit to increasing font weight)?
Or would those two simply be synonyms for '/foo/' and '*foo*'?  Same
for super- and sub-scripts.

Also, '/*bold italic*/' seems to imply that compositions are allowed.
I hope this isn't really true as I don't ever want to see '+_*''/big
subscript bold emphasized italic/''*_+' in a wiki page even as a joke.

> Indeed, we could even continue this symmetry to get rid of
> the totally ugly @@monospace@@ markup and substitute one of
> 
>     '@monospace@'     
>     '=monospace='

There's something to be said for the character doubling in
@@monospace@@.  It /is/ easier to type that '@monospace@'.  But that
said, I'm all for consistency; if it helps people remember the markup
then '@monospace@' is fine by me.

> And perhaps all of the monospace markup should just be relegated to 
> wikistyles 

please, no.

> Anyway, to get back to the original suggestion, I think my preference
> would be to keep ''emphasis'' and '''strong''' as they are now, so that
> there's still a way to write content structurally, and introduce
> '/italic/' and '*bold*' for the <b> and <i> tags.  
> 
> Thoughts?

Definitely keep ''emphasis'' and '''strong''' the way they are.
'*bold*' and '/italic/' work too as long as we don't accidentally
imply any generalizations that aren't there.  See above :-)

-Scott
-- 
Jonathan Scott Duff
duff at pobox.com