[pmwiki-users] using (:title:) markup

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Jul 04, 2005 at 03:13:10PM +0100, Ed W wrote:
> Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> >
> >I've been thinking that the solution is going to be that directives
> >and other things that result in empty strings will not generate a 
> >blank paragraph at the beginning of the page.  
>
> I'm a little confused as to why it would ever be a good idea to let 
> markup generate empty paragraphs?

Ah, I shouldn't have said "blank paragraph" -- what the markup really
does here is generate a vertical space which is used to render things
into paragraphs.

But more generally

    Here is some text.
    (:include OtherPage:)
    Here is some more text.

Seems pretty clear that if OtherPage is blank, the result is

    Here is some text.
    
    Here is some more text.

and thus the texts should be rendered in separate paragraphs with
vertical space in them.  This is certainly the case if OtherPage has
any blank lines in it.

> If I understand correctly then the current behaviour seems inconsistent 
> with HTML. 

Consistency with HTML isn't one of my goals, as HTML itself is broken
in a variety of ways.  Most notably, HTML's view of a paragraph is
itself horribly broken, which is why we have to do funny things with
vertical spaces in order to get things to a reasonable rendition.

PmWiki just tries to render the output in ways that are consistent
with what an author typically expects, and to make the "fix" 
understandable when the author gets something other than what 
was expected.

Pm