[pmwiki-users] linebreaks behavior setting in config.php?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 11:54:43AM -0600, Tegan Dowling wrote:
> On 2/9/07, Castiron <castiron at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'd gotten the impression from the last couple go-rounds on
> > (:linebreaks:) that you could set something in config.php to make your
> > PmWiki installation default to breaking lines at carriage returns, but
> > I can't figure out how to do it.  Is this actually possible?
> 
> Can someone explain why most of PmWiki's web admins apparently do NOT
> want this (or a cleaner version of it, if there's any problem with
> this version) behavior as the default?

This comes up from time to time on the list, and every time it has 
come up we've ended up with about equal numbers of people who 
prefer the current behavior and who would prefer (:linebreaks:) 
as the default.  

I think one of the biggest arguments in favor of PmWiki's
current default behavior is what has happened with the CREOLE
standard markup specification ( http://www.wikicreole.org/ ).

The CREOLE specification originally required that each markup
line be rendered as a separate line in output.  There was enough
dissent about this that CREOLE v0.4 recants this requirement, 
and now leaves the choice of linebreak behavior up
to individual implementations.  So, I think that's fairly
good evidence that there are lots of people in the world that
think linebreaks off by default is preferable.  There's
a nice summary of the advantages and disadvantages of each
approach at [1].  In January an informal poll was taken among
the wikicreole participants [2], and the results came out 2-to-1
in favor of having newlines be ignored (i.e., PmWiki's current
default).

PmWiki, of course, makes it possible for a wiki administrator
to change the default... and even allows authors to mix modes
within a single page.  And since there's not a clear majority
one way or the other, it's better to keep the existing behavior
and make sure it's simple for a site administrator to switch
to the other behavior if desired. 

    $HTMLPNewline = '<br />';

Pm

[1]  http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/ChangeLinebreakMarkupProposal

[2]  http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/VoteForLineBreaks