[pmwiki-users] historical question

[Radu]

At 05:58 PM 4/28/2005, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>   For example,
>someone entering a mathematical formula would be more than a little
>surprised when a = b*c + d*e  gets rendered as "a = b<b>c + d</b>e".
>And there are other conflicts with single asterisks, which is why
>I just avoided it entirely.

This might have been the original reason why the seminal c2 wiki did it 
this way. But in pmwiki we can put [==] around formulas, and the * at the 
start of a line could be replaced with a (less obtrusive) . That would also 
add more appropriate semantics to the markup, cos each point on a bullet 
list is, well... a point :)

>Part of the trick to choosing good markup is to choose something
>that's relatively easy to type, easy to remember, and that isn't
>likely to occur with some other meaning in normal text.

The part about the markup being easy to remember, having built-in semantics 
is exactly what I'm getting at. And the fact that markup might be 
overloaded is no news, it happens all the time with operators. I don't see 
why we have to sacrifice an already established markup for one that's as 
confusing as the multiple single quotes. Not to mention that under some 
fonts '' looks so much like ".

>   *That really doesn't work for asterisks, unfortunately.*

Asterisks are used in the print media to stand for footnotes, so its use as 
bullet marker is strange to begin with.

>I should also point out that PmWiki's '''text''' markup isn't
>"bold", it's "strong",

Good point. I got carried away by style over semantics. Sorry. Have you 
considered banging it then, as in !text!  ? You're already banging headers, 
it would seem appropriate. (pun definitely not intended :)


Cheers,
Radu
(www.monicsoft.net)