[pmwiki-users] want opinions on a new cookbook recipe format

[Chris Cox]

Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 04:13:57PM -0600, Chris Cox wrote:
>>>And since I'm eventually hoping to extend this concept to allow
>>>field-based searching of pages, it's probably better to prototype
>>>the cookbook this way.  If we later decide a directive-based form
>>>is better, it'll be no problem for me to write a script that converts
>>>them all at once.
>>That's cool.. I was just thinking about enforcement, it's kinda
>>loose right now.  I mean you can pretty much format things however
>>you want right now... right?
> 
> Sure, but I think looseness is generally a good thing.  With looseness
> we're able to handle "exceptions" much more easily, and by design the 
> Cookbook is all about making PmWiki do "exceptional" things (in both 
> senses of the word :-).
> 
> Indeed, the whole concept of a wiki is often to not enforce things
> into a particular structure.  :-)

While true.. the content described isn't what I would call
wiki free form... doesn't really fit that.  It's more like
a template or even a skin .. that actually enforces a look...
just my opinion of course.

Let's say a user supplies Summary: but doesn't supply Version:
(or worse, they don't supply Summary:)

What does that mean?

Perhaps the Version defaults to Unknown.. then the cookbook
person might supply it (believing that Unknown was not what
they wanted to see) and set it to Not Applicable or whatever.

At least there would be some consistency.  The user has
the rest of the page for free form matter.


> 
>>With a directive (or possibly some other kind of technique) we
>>could give a commonness to the look and feel and if combined
>>with some class= (div or whatever) we could allow skin producers
>>to match things up a bit to their own look.
> 
> Well, we can already give them a class by defining it in the
>  >>recipeinfo<< wikistyle (now done), and with a slight change
> to my Markup() definition (also done) it's now producing the results as:
> 
>   <div class='recipeinfo>
>     <div class='property-Summary'>Summary: ...</div>
>     <div class='property-Status'>Status: ...</div>
>     <div class='property-Maintainer'>Maintainer: ...</div>
>   </div>
> 
> This is a pretty good amount of structure to be hanging styling
> on.  Of course, we can easily add more spans and stuff to the output
> to style it further, without having to change the format of the
> markup used to produce it.  :-)

Yep.