[Pmwiki-users] Re: Re: markup musings, with missing #7 restored

[Christian Ridderström]

On Fri, 21 May 2004, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 04:27:03PM +0200, Christian Ridderstr?m wrote:
> 
> I'm look at ways of reducing the number of syntaxes used and making it
> easier for new folks to learn.

Ok, I can see the usefulness of that :-)

> > how about:
> > 	[[link text -> someGroup/in this page]]
> > where the order has been switched and '->' indicates that the 'link text' 
> > is pointing to SomeGroup.InThisPage. 
> 
> -> is nice, but I might get confused about what appears where.

The idea was that in 'a -> b', the 'a' would be a link to 'b', hoping that 
the '->' would make the "direction" clear. Btw, I don't see how '->' could 
be less clear than e.g. [[a | b]].

In general though, it'd be good if we had access to some people not
already familiar with a certain markup, so that we could ask for their
thoughts on this.

> > But you would you allow [PmWiki | Pm's favourite engine]?
> 
> Yes, of course!

Oh, ok -- just checking.

> 
> ... and I just remembered that PmWiki already excludes parens from URLs
> (one has to use %28 and %29)

What exactly do we want to allow in a URI? In the source I find

	$UrlPathPattern="[^\\s<>[\\]\"\'()`|^]*[^\\s<>[\\]\"\'()`|^,.?]";

I think some comments next to this definition would be nice, or perhaps a
reference to a wiki page where it's discussed. The characters that PmWiki
allows in a URI could also be compared to what's in general allowed in a
URI, together with an explanation that you can write %28 to get a '(' and
so on.

Anyway, does the above mean that '{' abd '}' are ok in a URI?

> > I don't easily understand the syntax above... IMHO it needs to be more
> > explicit. For instance, is 'my photos' a title or an alternate text?
> > (Assuming that both are valid).
> 
> For an image, it's alt= text.  For anything else, it's title= text.
> Have any suggestions that would be "more explicit"?

No :-(   I tried briefly but couldn't come up with one that I liked.

> I was just following my own constructions, so that I would expect
> 
>     [[W3C | Attach:w3c.jpg]][(World Wide Web Consortium)]
> 
> to come out as
> 
>     <a href='$ScriptUrl/$Group/W3C' ...><img src='.../w3c.jpg' 
>       alt='World Wide Web Consortium'></a>
>
> There is a good argument to be made that it should instead read
> 
>    [[W3C | Attach:w3c.jpg[(World Wide Web Consortium)] ]]

I'd definitely prefer this alternative.

> > Hmm.. using that thought combined with my earlier idea about '->' we would
> > use:
> > 	[[clickme | title text -> free link]]
> > which should result in a link with the text 'clickme' and the title 'title 
> > text' pointing to the page FreeLink. Flipping around this (i.e. using 
> > '<-' instead of '->' we would instead be using:
> > 	[[free link <- clickme | title]]
> > I don't know which is more intuitive, putting the link target first or
> > putting the link text first.
> 
> In the past I've generally taken the position that the target goes before
> the text--certainly this is what PmWiki does (as well as most other
> wiki engines, PhpWiki being a notable exception).  This is what
> happens in the HTML world -- the target appears (in the <a ...> tag)
> before the text.  OTOH, in written languages, the target often appears
> after the text (think footnotes or endnotes).  Still, for better or worse,
> the most widely used models seem to put the targets first.

What kind of new user's are you thinking of here?

* People who have never used a wiki at all before => use natural language
* People who have used other wiki's before => use reverse order

I'd say that aiming at people who've never used a wiki at all would be
better because there are more of them, and people who are already 
experienced with one wiki shouldn't have a big problem learning a new 
syntax.

(Slightly related, but in different languages we have different word 
order, e.g. in German extra verbs are added to the end. Anyway, I think 
us humans are quite flexible when it comes to this.)

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m                           http://www.md.kth.se/~chr