[pmwiki-users] improved markup for floating images...?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 04:13:52PM +0100, Ed W wrote:
> 
> >If we use "img:" for images and give it all sorts of special capabilities
> >like resizing and floating, then it somehow breaks that model, or at
> >least introduces something special beyond what InterMap links normally
> >do.
> > 
> >
> 
> Yeah, but in a way isn't it very similar to attach, but the main 
> difference being whether you want it inline or as an icon?  Media wiki 
> uses "image:" when you want to see it, and "media:" when you want a link 
> to it.  

PmWiki uses Attach:... or  http:... when you want to see it and 
[[Attach:...]] or [[http:...]] when you want a link to it.  It seems
more consistent that way.

> What they seem to do (haven't look at the code) is parse for any text 
> which looks like an option and get rid of that.  

We could do this fairly easily with PmWiki's "alt text" syntax.

> Media wiki doesn't let you use this syntax for anything which isn't 
> local, ie it only applies to the attach: syntax in the pm equivalent.  
> This seems fair enough.  If you just put in a URL which ends in a .jpg, 
> etc then I think this gets put inline, but that's about your lot in 
> terms of formatting images on other people's websites.

It seems to me that "an image is an image"; with the possible exception
of resizing images on the server, anything that we can do to an 
Attach: image we ought to be able to do to an http: one.  In fact, 
in a standard installation "Attach:" is really just a shortcut 
for the full http://... path to the uploads/ directory.

> >I definitely don't want to change PmWiki's current meaning of the
> >double square brackets, so yes, whatever syntax we come up with can't
> >rely on them to denote "image".  
> 
> Well, they use [[link]] exclusively for links as well.  In fact 
> mediawiki doesn't have automatic linking, only manual linking.  The 
> point is more that they use the [[ ]] to denote that it's is special and 
> not plain text.

PmWiki v1 used to use [[...]] to denote things that special, and
we ran into the problem that it was hard separate "special" things
from standard links.  So, PmWiki v2 uses [[...]] exclusively for
links, and special things go in the (:...:) syntax.

> Actually just have a browse around the site:
> http://en.wikipedia.com
> The syntax looks extremely clear when you view a page.  Probably one of 
> the most readable syntaxes that I have seen (only slightly different to 
> pm really).  

When designing PmWiki's current markup system I used other markups
(including MediaWiki) as a guideline to see what I liked and disliked
about them, so the closeness is not entirely an accident.  :-)

> I think because they allow HTML (and have an HTML 
> defang routine) it tends to mean that they stop forcing wiki syntax and 
> allow raw HTML a lot earlier

Wikipedia has a unique audience that I can't assume in many of
my applications.  For several sites that I run, once any raw 
HTML appears in a page, a lot of authors will self-impose exile 
because they believe HTML is too difficult for them to read
or edit.

> Can we get a conclusion on this then?
> Seems to me that from the above, since it's basically an extension to 
> "attach:", it might equally make sense to have a  image: syntax which is 
> mostly a copy of the code...

At the moment I fear we have fundamentally different views of 
what needs to be extended.  You're describing things in terms of
changes to the "Attach:" syntax, but in PmWiki "Attach:" isn't
the thing that means "inline image" -- inline images are formed from
any url with a png/gif/jp[e]g extension.  Thus in PmWiki we can do

    Attach:someimage.gif"alt text"
    http://www.example.com/someimage.gif"alt text"

and both consistently use the same syntax rules.  I think it's heading 
in the wrong direction to develop a special "image:" syntax that only 
works for attached files; it becomes another "special case", and
some sites will want to allow authors to floating/resizing/captioning 
of images without having to enable uploads.  Ultimately it's not
the prefix that should be saying "this is an inline image", it's the
.png/.gif/.jpg suffix.

Pm