[Pmwiki-users] Re: more --signature markup thoughts

[Christian Ridderström]

Good idea to summarize the "saga"... unfortunately, my contribution
is likely to confuse the issue further ;-)

On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> After looking at many of the pages in the beta site, it seemed pretty
> obvious to me that the "natural" form for a signature was "--username"

Today, we can create signatures using standard markup like this:
	Markup				Appearance
	--Profiles/MyName		--MyName
	--Profiles/{{My Name}}		--My Name
What are the advantages/drawback?
+ Uses standard markup rules
- Relatively long to type
- Consistent formatting of signatures (colours etc) more difficult

As a general question... how important is it that the signature markup
resembles the appearance? I.e., if it should appear as '--' (or as
—), should the markup then contain '--'?

To complicate the issue, it's not uncommon (in Sweden at least) to write
your signature as '/ Christian' or '/Christian'. Personally I'm fine with
associating '--' with a signature, but maybe this is something that
actually is specific to a certain culture/language? I'm not sure what the
implications are of this though... e.g. maybe there's no point in using
'--' in the markup? OTOH, we have to start somewhere and '-- ' is 
standard separator for your signature in e-mails...
Or are we focusing too much on '--'?


Then I started thinking about what a signature is, and it's purpose:
* A signature is a reference to a person, mostly found next to a 
  piece of text where it indicates the author (often yourself).

* Visually, this reference can be a name (Patrick) or a signature (Pm)
  (it could even be some image)

* Functionally, the reference should be a link to a 'profile'-page.

Some additional considerations:
* It should be easy to add a signature (encourages you to sign your text)
** => The markup should be short so that it's easy to write.
* It should be clear from the visual appearance that it's a signature 
  (e.g. by prepending the signature mark with '--')
: : => So that the reader knows that this refers to the author.

Is this what we all mean by a "signature", or are we thinking of other 
uses for this markup as well? Would we like to use the markup just to 
refer to a person? (E.g. '[[~Pm]] wrote that...')

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m                           http://www.md.kth.se/~chr