[pmwiki-users] improved markup for floating images...?

[Ed W]

>>Can we get a conclusion on this then?
>>Seems to me that from the above, since it's basically an extension to 
>>"attach:", it might equally make sense to have a  image: syntax which is 
>>mostly a copy of the code...
>>    
>>
>
>At the moment I fear we have fundamentally different views of 
>what needs to be extended.  You're describing things in terms of
>changes to the "Attach:" syntax, but in PmWiki "Attach:" isn't
>the thing that means "inline image" -- inline images are formed from
>any url with a png/gif/jp[e]g extension.
>

Hmm, well not fundamentally different, just a case of trying to figure 
out the best syntax.

The left and right aligning might be a tiny bit of a red herring in that 
what *I* really want is some nice thumbnailing ability and the ability 
to put nice frames around selected content (basically I would be happy 
with the wikipedia stuff, say).  It's not a limitation for *my* site to 
have to upload the files in order to style and resize them.

Agreed that not everyone likes the standard look of any given image 
frame, but I suspect that most people either want pictures framed or 
not, and they can fiddle with the CSS to get a site look to their 
images.  At least they have a starting point under this proposal

So I could clarify my view as simply being able to repro the features of 
the media wiki advanced image syntax


>  Thus in PmWiki we can do
>
>    Attach:someimage.gif"alt text"
>    http://www.example.com/someimage.gif"alt text"
>  
>

My first thoughts when I saw this were that the "alt text" looked 
extremely "bolted on".  The pipe "|" syntax is neater to my eye, but 
then we get back to how to delimit the end of the text which has spaces 
in it...

>and both consistently use the same syntax rules.  I think it's heading 
>in the wrong direction to develop a special "image:" syntax that only 
>works for attached files; it becomes another "special case", and
>some sites will want to allow authors to floating/resizing/captioning 
>of images without having to enable uploads.  Ultimately it's not
>the prefix that should be saying "this is an inline image", it's the
>.png/.gif/.jpg suffix.
>  
>

OK, I'm comfortable with that.  But overloading the alt text to add 
these extra features is now what we are talking about.  Got any 
suggestions for style?

Things which would be useful for me would be:

* thumbnailing
* frame
* caption (implies a frame to be added)
* resize without a thumbnail link
* graphical links, ie the picture can be a hyperlink

More advanced and slightly nice to have stuff would be:
* Easy way to give the image a classid so that I can style this image 
with some CSS
* Or ability to wrap the image in a DIV for the same reasons.
* Possibly hit both of the above by having some standard frame CSS which 
makes it easy to hit, but with a unique (optional) outer div which 
allows you to just pick out certain images.  Basically so that I can 
have a standard frame for pictures and then one day when I need a 
flowery image button which does some clever rollover stuff, etc, I just 
tag my image and hit just that image with some custom CSS

It looks like for simplicity we can discuss three cases here:
* Attachments which are meant to be shown as attachments, ie not inline
* Attachments which are meant to be shown inline and have some resizing 
ability at the server end (other formatting not considered yet)
* Inline images which can be formatted, captioned, etc, etc, including 
the resized versions from the point above

Got any thoughts on how best to do this?

Ed W

>Pm
>  
>