[Pmwiki-users] How retain exact link spacing (& capitalization?) in header/trail, but no wikiword spacing in page?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Dec 23, 2004 at 08:41:27AM -0600, Mike Harris wrote:
> Main question:
> 
> If create link [[Test Page]], how get it to display in header/top of
> page (trail?) with spacing retained (ex: Main / Test Page  or  Main /
> Test_Page), while not allowing wikiword spacing in body of pages?

Try this:

1.  Turn on WikiWord spacing:   $SpaceWikiWords = 1;
2.  Disable WikiWord links:     Markup('wikilink', '>urllink');

There's a good argument to be made that with $LinkWikiWords==0 then
$SpaceWikiWords should not affect things in the text, but when I wrote
the code I had some reason for having it the way it is now, although
I can't remember what it was.

> it cited a dev # that appeared to be
> higher than the current beta #.    Though I'm still on 2.0.beta 7.....
> and upgrading might help?

The devel releases were prior to the beta releases.

> Or is it better to just go with wikiword-like (nonspacing) display at
> in header/trail and encourage authors to place a "spaced and capitalized
> as desired" version of the page title at the top of the page text?

Nope, it's probably better for us to get things to happen automatically
as much as we can.

> Is it practical to be able to create a link [[iPrint]] and have that
> capitalization be retained/displayed at the top (header/trail?) of that
> page (instead of IPrint)?  

I'll note in passing that John Rankin has posted numerous well-thought
out messages on this topic, and I just haven't been able to bring myself
around to adopting them yet.  They're in the archives somewhere.  :-)

Part of the problem with something like [[iPrint]] is that the name used 
to identify a page is really independent of the phrases we might use to 
link to it.  For example, given that [[wiki administrators]] and 
[[Wiki administrators]] both link to the same page, which of these
capitalizations should the page use in its title?  The answer is "neither", 
as English states fairly clearly that titles should have each major word 
capitalized.  (BTW, in the past John Rankin has also created some excellent 
plugins that make PmWiki's capitalization smarter, by not capitalizing 
words such as "a", "the", and "for".)

> Not critical, but one runs into "i" products from Novell, Apple, etc.  

Yes, but I'm not sure we want to use trademarks as the basis for
the default capitalization rules.  :-)

> Or perhaps capitalization of leading characters
> is just a given in wikis and I should get over it ;-)  ?  

Capitalization of the leading characters doesn't *have* to be a given,
it's just a very useful default.  It's very doable to customize PmWiki
to use uncapitalized names, but there are some far-reaching implications
of doing so.  For one, it makes Apache url rewriting a bit more 
interesting, since we cannot key rewriting using the case of the first 
letter.

> And just encourage authors to place a "spaced and capitalized as 
> desired" version of the page title at the top of the page text?

This is probably good practice anyway.  There's a reason that XHTML
requires every page to have a <title> tag (indeed, it's the only required
tag in the header :-).  And the ability to specify a (:title:) was one
of the driving forces in the design of PmWiki 2.

> And a suggestion re mail list archives:
> 
> Don't know that this is practical, but might consider periodically
> collecting multiple months together into a single lump (term?), to
> facilitate searching across larger spans of time.  

I don't know how practical this would be.  However, the entire
pmwiki-users archive is available and searchable at gmane.org, 
see http://search.gmane.org/search.php?group=gmane.comp.web.wiki.pmwiki.user .

> Possible break points might be year end, major version number (V1, V2beta, 
> V2prod).  

Perhaps, but I haven't noticed a correspondence between releases and
the traffic/content on pmwiki-users.  Perhaps another useful approach
would be to simply maintain a page somewhere with links into the archive
for historically key threads and posts.  Indeed, one way to find the
historically key posts would be to search the archive for http-references
to other pages in the archive.  :-)

Pm