[Pmwiki-users] pmwiki.org converted to 2.0.devel27

[Jonathan Scott Duff]

On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 06:17:51PM +1300, John Rankin wrote:
> First, congratulations and a big thank you to Patrick.

Ditto!

> When editing a page, an author wants an easy way to find out
> "How do I achieve effect xxx?"
> 
> Consider a MarkupQuickReference page showing examples of all markup 
> effects, while hiding the markup to produce them.

Sounds antithetical to me.  The whole reason for the quick reference
is to show the markup that generates the effects.  :-)

> If an author mouses over a particular effect, the markup to
> generate that effect displays as a tool tip. For example, if
> an author mouses over superscript (which is rendered as
> superscript text), the tooltip is '^superscript^'

That sounds neat. When someone mouses over a link, does the actual
markup used to generate that link appear or all possible link markups?
I'd guess the former as it's easier to come by in the general case.

> In other words, show an author what's possible, but hide the 
> detail until it's needed. This makes it possible to put a lot
> of effects into a small space, without losing clarity.

Again, this doesn't sound right for a quick ref, but for pages in
general it sounds great.

> I'm thinking that one might put examples of block markups in 
> a side bar and links and inline markups in a panel below the
> edit box. But I'm still exploring different options.
> 
> How is this achieved?
> 
> The markup 
>     {text:text definition}
> 
> generates
>     <dfn title='text definition'>text</dfn>
> 
> Thus
>     {'^superscript^':'^superscript^'}
> 
> generates
>     <dfn title="'^superscript^'"><sup>superscript</sup><dfn>

Oh! Until this point, I was mostly thinking that this feature could be
automated such that you wouldn't *need* to specify the "definition"
part. Something like surrounding the text with a special block markup
that causes all effects within the block to render with tooltips that
show the actual markup used to generate it. For example, if [>= =<] were
that block markup, then

[>=
This is some '''bold''' text
#thing one 
#thing two
=<]

would render as

<p>This is some <dfn title="'''bold'''"><b>bold</b></dfn> text</p>
<dfn title="#thing one\n#thing two"><ul><li>thing one</li><li>thing
two</li></ul></dfn>

Or something along those lines.  The "block markup" that would cause
this could be something else entirely, that's just what I thought of
first.

> I considered several markups and propose {text:text definition}
> for the following reasons:
> - it's similar to the {abbr|abbreviation} extension: both
>   generate a tool tip

So ... how exactly does the new proposal differ from {X|Y} ? I would
expect that you could achieve your desired results from something like
'''{bold|'''bold'''}''' Does that not work correctly now? Is it just
that you want more semantic effect from the LHS and less from the RHS?
If so, why not modify the {X|Y} syntax slightly? Perhaps one of these:

{{X|Y}}
{:X|Y}
{:X|Y:}
+{X|Y}
{+X|Y}
etc.

-Scott
-- 
Jonathan Scott Duff
duff at pobox.com