[Pmwiki-users] Categories instead of hierarchies?

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Mon Oct 25 19:56:01 CDT 2004


On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 10:21:46AM +1300, John Rankin wrote:
> 1. categories are useful and cool
> 2. by default, category pages go in the Category group
>    or your local language equivalent
> 3. no changes to PmWiki are needed -- just put
>     [[Category/XYZ]]
>   on the page

Agreed with all of the above.

> 4. do we want a special markup for categories?

Because I'm cautious about eating up markup space I'm going
to leave this to group consensus; however, given that both
John Rankin and Scott Duff (probably the top two contributors 
to PmWiki after myself) have come out in favor of a special 
markup, I'd say it's very likely there will be one.

> 5. if so the choices are:
>  a) a directive keyword, such as (:category XYZ:)
>  b) a shortcut character (cf [[~Pm]]), such as [[!XYZ]]
>  c) an inline markup (cf <<|TrailPage|>>), such as 
>    <<!XYZ!>>

Of course, these choices aren't entirely mutually exclusive.  My
personal preference is something along the lines of [[!XYZ]],
as long as we recognize that this also implies that every page
in a category therefore has a link to that category's page.
The link could be hidden via a variety of mechanisms, however,
including %comment% and (:comment:).  If [[!XYZ]] doesn't normally
produce a link of some sort, we shouldn't be using double brackets 
here.  (What a site-admin chooses to do is up to him/her, however.)

I don't have strong feelings in favor of any particular 
prefix character with (b), but I'm not fond of either '&' or '*'
('*' looks too much like a query string parameter or an HTML 
character entity, and '*' is too "wildcardish"  Sorry, Scott. :-)  
I could envision [[^XYZ]] in the sense of "go up a level 
to category XYZ", but at the moment I'm skittish about anything
involving "levels".  John had also suggested [[?XYZ]], but
'?' strikes me as being either a prompt of some sort (forms?)
or as part of a query string.  [[!XYZ]] seems reasonable as 
long as someone doesn't think of it as "jump to header XYZ" 
or "heading link".  Other possibilities just so we don't 
overlook a possible winner:
   [[@XYZ]]
   [[`XYZ]] (` is same key as ~ on my keyboard)
   [[>XYZ]]

I think that (c) would almost have to be "in addition to (b)"
and not the sole markup for categories, as placing a page into
a category shouldn't automatically imply that the author wants
a trail to be displayed for it.

Option (a) just seems like too much typing to me for something
that would have to be used frequently to be useful.

So I think the only questions are "yes/no" on item 4
(and the answer is almost certainly "yes" unless we get some
strong objections) and the prefix character to be used for
the category markup.

Pm



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