[Pmwiki-users] Re: link icons

Christian Ridderström chr
Thu Jul 22 04:31:34 CDT 2004


On Thu, 22 Jul 2004, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> Without saying anything for or against the merits of icons or the way
> PmWiki currently does things, I think I should note that the '?' used
> for creating new pages is indeed an icon of sorts -- a graphical image
> representing an action -- it's just that the meaning of the '?' isn't
> often unclear to many users.

My main dislike of having a '?' indicate a new link is that I've felt 
inhibited in using '?' in normal text, afraid it'll be confused with a 
link to a new page... (yes I know, this is totally screwed up).

Then there's also the annoyance of seing the sentence being prematurely
ended, when e.g. new page? is really just a link.

> I know that I never seem to be able to intuitively figure out the icons
> that MoinMoin uses and I end up having to hover to figure out what each
> does (which somewhat defeats the purpose of having an icon).

Lol, that's the same example I gave initially... maybe we should tell 
MoinMoin to change their icons ;-)

> Is it necessarily true that *any* punctuation mark is bad?  How about
> angle quotes, like ?this??

As in ?newPage?, where the entire link is enclosed?  That seems like a 
much better solution than '?'.

> (These are &laquo; and &raquo;, or we could use <<this>> for people w/o
> Latin-compatible fonts.)  Yes, I know they're used as "real" punctuation
> in many non-English languages; OTOH, I'm not sure that using them in
> this manner is entirely incorrect or disturbing to someone reading the
> text.

I the french write ?this? when I would write "this", but I'm not sure. 
If writing "new link" is good or bad is another question.

Would it make sense to write [[new link]] (pmwiki-2.0 syntax), emphasizing 
that this is a link by using something that looks similar to link markup?

>  ?this? would also give an advantage over 'this?' as one could easily
> see the entire link phrase associated with the link (e.g., if the link
> phrase contains spaces).

Sounds like a very good idea to me... now it actually seems obvious that 
the whole new link should be displayed differently somehow.

> Other options might be &lsaquo and &rsaquo (look like '<' and '>' but 
> smaller)  or  &lfloor and &rfloor.

I tried making a page to illustrate how this would look:

	http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Test/NewLinkAppearance
	http://www.pmwiki.org/devel/pmwiki.php/Test/NewLinkAppearance	

but I was unable to use HTML-entities inside the link name... is that a 
bug or a feature? (i.e. [[SomePage &laquo;hmm]] is shown as '&laguo;hmm'.)

/Christian

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





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