[Pmwiki-users] the descriptions of emphasis

Joachim Durchholz jo
Tue Dec 7 08:58:55 CST 2004


Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 07, 2004 at 12:44:57PM +0100, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> 
>> I specifically request that PmWiki remain simple. Actually I'm a
>> bit concerned that it's already a bit too complicated for the end
>> users I'm planning to use PmWiki right now (I have to admit that I
>> haven't had the time to fully assess the PmWiki end-user syntax
>> yet, so this concern more a vague "that's something I still have to
>> check" rather than a "PmWiki is already beyond usability for my
>> purposes").
> 
> Don't worry, I don't have any plans to add layers of complexity to
> PmWiki. In fact, I believe that the PmWiki 2 markup is much simpler
> and easier to learn than PmWiki 1's markup, because it's more
> regular.  For example, double brackets are now used exclusively for
> link markup, and there's no longer a need to worry about when to use
> {{...}} versus [[...]]-- one always uses [[...]] to create a link.

Yup, I'm aware of that change (and have been appreciating it).

In fact that change was one of the things that made my conscience rest a
little bit easier that I still didn't get around to installing PmWiki
;-) (I plan to get serious sometime after PmWiki 2.0 finished beta
testing - hopefully that will work out...)

BTW thanks for all the responsiveness on the list, and I'm drawing my
hat to somebody who keeps making progress despite the constant
distraction of a very active mailing list.

My worries just came from non-link markup ideas that have been floating 
around (such as (:emphasis:) and somesuch). I have seen several wikis 
going from "simple" to "too complex", and I attribute it to the fact 
that it's very, very easy to add "just that one more tiny markup", 
ending in lots and lots of things to remember (and, worse still, all 
these markups are different between wikis - <wishful thinking> why can't 
the various wikis not just stick with [b]...[/b] etc. as is done in most 
PHP-based message boards... </wishful thinking>).

BTW I just checked the markup syntax... and, well, it didn't look too 
good, at least for my purposes. Not that all of these markups aren't 
good for something (and several of them include thing I wouldn't have 
thought of but which are still useful), but it's far too difficult to 
remember all of them.
Something along the lines of "there's always a [markup]...[/markup] 
syntax available" would help tremendously. (Even though I, sitting at a 
German keyboard, share that common profound hatred for those {[]}\~@| 
characters that are so incredibly awkward to type...)
Well, I'll simply have to remove the markup I don't like ;-)) (twiddling 
with markup syntax seems to be rather commonplace when I look at the 
Cookbook recipes anyway... which is good because I can implement my 
ideas, and bad because no two PmWikis will have the same markup syntax 
*sigh*)

Regards,
Jo



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