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

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 09:18:54PM +0100, Ed W wrote:
> Patrick - I need a bit longer to digest all of the above - but I think 
> if you simply pasted most of this into the wikistyles page I (and 
> presumably the rest of the world) would have realised just how much more 
> powerful they are than I ever realised!

The wikistyles documentation has long been out-of-date; in fact, there's
even a PITS entry for it: http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/00006

(The fact that this is PITS #00006 (out of 479), and that it was 
entered on August 24, *2004* gives an idea of just how out-of-date 
some of the documentation is. :-)

> - I think you will need to lift some of the nesting restrictions with 
> this strategy or else we can't have images with borders inside certain 
> tables (because the div syntax can't currently be nested in an advanced 
> table?) 

I'm thinking that the standard syntax for images of this type will 
end up being something like

   %imright framed% Attach:image.gif [[<<]] Caption

which will work without having to worry about nested divs/tables.
The main thing I'm not sure about is the "imright" name.

> - Personally I would love to see it possible to nest *advanced* 
> tables.... (They are advanced after all...)

The problem with nesting of any structure is that authors have to add 
lots of end-tags in order for PmWiki to be able to figure out the nesting
sequence.  Worse, the end-tags have to be added whether they're needed
or not.  My strong opinion is that for nested tables one should
simply enable and use the HTML table syntax directly.  PmWiki's
advanced table syntax was never intended to be an "arbitrary table"
syntax -- it's more intended as a way to be able to do macro-level
things like create columns (and before we had divs, to be able to
do things on a div-like level).

> - The style stuff looks great actually.  I never realised that you could 
> do so much.  The wiki styles page only hints at what is possible...

Yes, it does need a better description.

> - Finally I can live without proper thumbnailing, but it's a nice to 
> have for some projects.  I think it could be done more easily by having 
> the attach syntax only return a direct link to the file if there is no 
> size specification - otherwise it is handled just like when you disable 
> direct downloads.  

This could be done.  More to the point, the width= and height=
wikistyle attributes could fairly easily detect that they're working
on an image attachment and adjust the url appropriately, so that
the syntax remains exactly the same for sites that have resizing
capabilities as for those that do not.

Pm