[pmwiki-users] Input recipe

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Thu Jun 23 14:04:01 CDT 2005


On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 02:45:50PM -0400, Martin Fick wrote:
> 
> Hmm, the main objection I still have is that is looks an
> awfull lot like straight HTML.  While it might be safer
> than enablehtml, it doesn't look much better and I don't
> know that it would make sense to non-html aware people.

How many non-html aware people are likely to be creating forms?
More to the point, I think there just comes a level of
advancement where we have to recognize that HTML (or an HTML-like
markup) is in fact the best encoding for advanced sorts of things.
It has the advantage that some people are already familiar with it,
and thus don't have to learn a completely new syntax or system.

> Maybe (:input :) is the power solution like (:table) but we
> create simple shorthand form solutions also?  How could we 
> use WikiForms as a starting place (bu only as a front end)?
> It has a very 'wiki like' syntax. :)

I don't have a problem at all with shorthand syntax -- but I haven't
found one I like for forms.  To be effective any shorthand syntax 
must generally:

  1. be sufficiently powerful to handle common needs
  2. be somewhat obvious/easy to use/easy to remember
  3. not conflict with other common uses of the markup characters
  4. not commonly appear in normal text

If a "shorthand" syntax ends up with too many special cases
or options needed to achieve #1, then it becomes harder to achieve
2-4.  At that point it is often better to just use a regularized 
syntax, such as the directives or HTML.

So, if we can come up with a good shorthand syntax for form
elements, I'm all for it, but lacking that it seems a regularized 
syntax (with strong allusions to HTML) would be better.

Pm



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