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

John Rankin john.rankin
Mon Nov 29 14:06:24 CST 2004


On Tuesday, 30 November 2004 5:27 AM, Jonathan Scott Duff <duff at pobox.com> wrote:
>> 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.  :-)

Not quite; the purpose of the quick reference is for an author
to discover quickly what markup to use to achieve a particular 
effect. To achieve this, we want to show the author the markup
she needs, when she needs it. "Just in time" information
rather than possible information overload.

Neil Herber's suggestion is another approach, where you ignore the
RHS unless you need it.
>
>> 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.

The former.
>
>> 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.

You may be right... I just find that as the amount of markup
expands, there is too much irrelevant information. 
>
>> 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>
>
...
>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?

Well, {X|Y} generates the <abbr> element; we should only be using it
for abbreviations. For example, most browsers display text inside <abbr>
... </abbr> in italics and text inside <dfn> ... </dfn> as plain text.

So in your example, '''{bold|'''bold'''}''' probably displays as bold 
italics.

>If so, why not modify the {X|Y} syntax slightly? 

Well, I thought that's what I was doing...

>Perhaps one of these:
>
>{{X|Y}}
>{:X|Y}
>{:X|Y:}
>+{X|Y}
>{+X|Y}
>etc.

As Patrick says, there are potential problems with the : proposal.

I think I like his suggestion of {:X:Y} which strengthens the 
:term:definition connection while retaining the {X|Y} notion.
In the same vein, {:X|Y} would work too. 

If we want to write {:mailto:duff at pobox.com|mailto:duff at pobox.com}
the | might be a better option.

Once I sort out our wiki spam problem, I'll put up a demo...

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin





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