[Pmwiki-users] Reflection on link syntax

John Rankin john.rankin
Wed Jun 30 17:32:18 CDT 2004


On Thursday, 1 July 2004 10:37 AM, Thomas -Balu- Walter <list+pmwiki-users at b-a-l-u.de> wrote:
>On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 04:00:41PM -0600, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>> I've gone back and forth on this, and ultimately chose PmWiki's
>> current ordering because it's the one that most frequently occurs
>> in other (wiki) markup syntaxes.  Also, while it's true that there
>> are many times when people think "text, then target", there are also
>> lots of times when people think "target, now text".
>
>Ack. I often copy a link somewhere, paste it into the wiki and then
>describe it. I'd also say that the link is more important than the
>explanation - a descriptive text without the link is useless. The other
>way round you can still go and look ;)
>
>-- Balu    
>
Up to a point... The text is there so the author can describe to the
reader the nature of the link, precisely so the reader can make an
informed judgement on whether to follow the link. I'm not sure that
we should confuse the order in which events occur (copy link, then
describe it) with their importance. If editing a page, the text of
the link is more useful than the address, because it conveys meaning.
So when editing a page, it seems more natural (to me) to see the
text first.

But, you are right that it isn't black and white. I like Pm's
suggestion of offering an alternative syntax, but wonder if for
PmWiki 2 there might be a more even-handed approach. There was a
suggestion a while ago for:

    [[link] text]

So one could presumably then write:

    [text [link]]

I don't have a good answer, but

    [[link | text]]
    [[text -> link]]

(as Pm posted while I composed this) feels a bit wrong (and I
agree that [[link <- text]] feels wrong)

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin





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