[pmwiki-users] Re: Re: <div> markup suggestions...?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 12:03:34PM +1300, John Rankin wrote:
> >A few other random ideas...
> Hmmm... FWIW, I think the chosen markup ought to relate to
> existing markup conventions if possible, rather than
> introduce another convention to remember.

Reasonable.

> The reservation I have about things like {%Pm%} is that 
> they don't let me know that "I'm an opener and somewhere
> there will be a bit of markup to close me". Similarly, 
> things like {%%} don't (to me) look like "I'm a closer".

Also reasonable.  In many cases, however, I don't think of
things in terms of "openers and closers", I just think of
them as "okay, now I want to be in this mode".  In this sense
the wikistyle %% isn't a "closer", it's just saying "okay, 
the text that follows doesn't have any special styling on
it."  

So, assuming |% as a (:div:) shortcut, I'd prefer to also use
that same sequence as the closer.

    |%Pm
    This is stuff written by Pm
 
    More stuff by Pm.

    |%Jr
    This is John's stuff.

    |%
    This is outside of any specialized <div>

I suppose I could live with this.  And we could allow '%|' as a
synonym for those who do want to do openers/closers.  But even though |%
has some analogies to | (tables) and % (wikistyles), somehow '|%'
just doesn't say "div" to me.  And it doesn't seem to "read" as well as

    >>Pm<<
    This is stuff written by Pm

    More stuff written by Pm

    >>Jr<<
    This is John's stuff

    >><<
    This has no special meaning.

More to the point, the reason why '|' was used for table markup was
that it's a natural separator for columns:

    || alpha || beta    || gamma ||
    || delta || epsilon || kappa ||

But somehow '|' doesn't quite work for sections or cells that are 
going to be displayed vertically on the page.  If anything, the
vertical nature of <div> probably means that our separators 
ought to look "horizontal" somehow-- i.e., '-' or '_' instead of '|'.  
So maybe a markup based on that...

    --% Pm
    -%Pm%-
    --%Pm%--
    %%%Pm%%%

I dunno.   Brainstorm some more.  :-)

Pm