[Pmwiki-users] reset button on edit window presents challenge

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 07:58:00AM -0500, Neil Herber wrote:
> The three buttons at the bottom of an edit window are: Save, Preview, and 
> Reset.  As long as the user has *not* done a preview, the Reset button 
> reverts the text in the edit window to the original. When a user does a 
> preview, PmWiki seems to declare that previewed page as the new state 
> to revert to when Reset is pressed.

Yes -- it's just using the <input type='reset' ... /> button provided
by HTML.  

> So if a user is having difficulties getting the look they want and does 
> multiple previews, they have no obvious way of reverting to the original 
> page. In my case, I just abandon the edit by clicking on another link. 
> Presumably, this leave the page locked. 

Of course, in reality PmWiki doesn't "lock pages" for editing, although
I can see how a new author might have this misperception and be concerned
about this (and generating such concern is definitely to be avoided),
but since the edit page is full of links to other places (sidebar, 
page history, recent changes, etc.) one could quickly deduce that PmWiki
already knows how to handle it, which it does.

> To a new user, the Reset button appears to be inconsistent in its effects.
> [...] Would it not be better to replace the Reset button with an Abandon Edit 
> button that would take the user back to the normal view of the unedited 
> page?

For aesthetic reasons I'd prefer just "Abandon", or to just omit the button
entirely.  "Abandon Edit" would make the least-used (and least-useful) 
button the largest of the three, which is wrong.

> As a matter of PmWiki etiquette, should I be posting items like this here 
> or on PITS??

We're still making the guidelines as we go -- PITS is fairly new.  
I'd say that the mailing list is probably more useful for items that 
invite discussion or written responses before any code changes are made.  
Thus, questions like "how do I ..." and "would it be a good idea to..." 
probably come to the mailing list.  However, discussion on the mailing
list has a transient quality to it, so PITS is our longer-term memory
of things we want to address but perhaps can't be gotten to immediately.
This makes it useful for bug reports and feature requests that may take
longer to address.

Items can (and do) move between the mailing list and PITS.  After discussing
something in the mailing list we may relegate the state of the
discussion to a PITS entry so we can pick it up again later.  Going the
other way, someone can bring up a PITS entry for discussion in the 
mailing list if they think its a ripe issue that can be (or needs to be) 
addressed immediately.

Pm