[pmwiki-users] RFC: Eliminating <p class='vspace'></p>
John Rankin
john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
Sun Apr 2 18:44:47 CDT 2006
On Saturday, 1 April 2006 9:19 PM, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
>Here's the proposal I'm currently playing with:
>
> - There will no longer be any <p class='vspace'></p> in the
>output.
>
> - "Bare" text that follows a blank line and is not associated with
> any block-level markup becomes <p
>class='vspace'>...text...</p>.
>
> - Bare text not associated with block level markup that does *not*
> follow a blank line becomes a simple <p>...text...</p>.
> (Perhaps we'll put a class= designator on this as well -- I
> just can't come up with a good name at the moment.)
So the first paragraph on a page is a bare <p>?
>
> - Other blank lines in the markup (e.g., in lists) produce
> <div class='vspace'><div> to generate vertical whitespace
> (controlled by the $HTMLVSpace variable).
What is the reason for not continuing to use <p class='vspace'></p>
in this case?
>
>Some likely consequences of this proposal:
>
>1. Because "paragraph text" will be producing either <p>
> or <p class='vspace'>, the wikistyles.php code will have to be
> substantially modified in order to properly apply styles to
> paragraphs containing a class= attribute. (Is this okay,
> John? I'll be glad to help with any side effects to
> wikipublisher.php.)
This is going to cause all sorts of interesting issues. At the
moment, we set $HTMLVSpace = '<vspace/>'; and then replace this
in post-processing with appropriate skip attribute values in
the tags that come after. This will break under the proposed
scheme. In general, tags are /much/ easier for wikipublisher to
handle than styles.
At the moment, I cannot see how we will be able to achieve what
we do now with the proposed approach, without a lot of work. Sigh.
For us, getting the spacing right is literally 2 lines of code.
>
<snip>
>
>4. This proposal does not necessarily invalidate the earlier
> proposal for an explicit paragraph markup -- my comments regarding
> the potential usefulness of starting a new paragraph without
> requiring a blank space still apply.
and could be done as a cookbook recipe in the first instance...
<snip>
>
>6. For those sites that need it, there will be an option of
> some sort to cause PmWiki to revert to its existing 2.1.x
> behavior of using <p class='vspace'></p>.
If we could invoke this option in the pdf channel, then the
only change to wikipublisher would be to turn this option on.
While I can see the theoretical justification, if it's a
substantial change, I can't see that the benefit warrants the
effort. I *think* the same effect could be achieved by introducing
a $HTMLPSpace variable that is only used before a <p> tag, with
a default value of $HTMLVSpace. Those who wish to can set it to
'' and still achieve the effects they desire.
--
JR
--
John Rankin
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