[Pmwiki-users] more --signature markup thoughts

[Patrick R. Michaud]

An update on the signature markup saga...

After looking at many of the pages in the beta site, it seemed pretty
obvious to me that the "natural" form for a signature was "--username"
at the end of a line, and so I went ahead and set things up that way
in 0.6.beta5 and 0.6.beta6...but it doesn't work well.  The pattern
I used was

   (^|\s)--\s?[[:alpha:]][-\w\s]+\W*$

and this pattern likes to catch lots of lines where an author has
entered a dash (--) into normal text--this paragraph contains an
excellent example of doing just that.  In the few pages I looked at
there were a number of ?-links displayed from the pattern incorrectly
assuming a signature where none was intended.

The problem is that the pattern is a little too permissive if it allows
arbitrary names (words) with spaces follow.  Thus, we'll likely have to be
a bit more restrictive somehow.  Ideas:
  1. require "--" to be followed by a single capitalized word at the
     end of a line; allows "--Pm" and "--JohnDoe" but not 
     "--Patrick Michaud" or --johnny
  2. Don't create ?-links on signatures that don't exist (thus losing
     the invitation and easy link to create the profile)
  3. Adopt some other markup for signatures, such as
       ~~username
       --/username
       [[~username]]
       {{--username}}
       --username--
  4. Some combination of the above
  5. Something we haven't thought of yet
  6. Just stick with the normal markup rules as in "--Profiles/UserName"

Ideas?

Pm