[pmwiki-users] floating box on the right

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 07:39:43AM -0800, dan mcmullen wrote:
> Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> >On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 03:54:01PM +1100, Nathan Jones wrote:
> >>Have you decided on shorthand syntax yet? 
> >>The >>class<<, >>#id<< and >><< (end) option is nice.
> >
> >So far these are the leading candidates.
> 
> i'm a bit concerned that '<' & '>' are also used so prominently in 
> html/xml.  i imagine i will be doing a few double takes, particularly as 
> this usage inverts the way html/xml brackets things.  also, this would be 
> the only 'begin-end' markup in PmWiki which does not have a visual symmetry 
> that reflects that behavior.

One reason why I've avoided the use of '<' and '>' in any markup is
to avoid any confusion with XML.  However, I've been thinking that 
>>...<< is visually distinctive enough from <...> that it's not 
likely to cause any real difficulty or confusion.  Plus, it has to
always occur at the beginning of a line (and probably on a line by
itself) to have the intended meaning.

Also, note that this would not be the only 'begin-end' markup in PmWiki
without visual symmetry:  %% (wikistyles) is used as a begin-end markup
w/o symmetry, and depending on what is meant by "visual symmetry", so
are '', ''', and @@.

But I'm not fully committed to >>...<< as a div markup yet -- it's just 
the leading candidate at the moment.  I'm still very open to alternatives
(and see the thread starting at http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.wiki.pmwiki.user/10363 for the discussion that ultimately led to >>...<<).

Observations from that thread:
  - Several people remarked that they didn't understand the discussion
    or purpose of <div> markups until they saw the example using >>...<<,
    at which point it made sense and garnered lots of support.
  - The visual representation of the markup needs to somehow resemble a
    "horizontal separator" of some sort, since it is dividing the markup
    into (generally vertical) blocks.  By analogy, the ||...|| markup
    tends to divide things into horizontal blocks.  
  - Other markups that have been considered
      ==class== ... ====
      ====%class% ... ====
          = too often used for other things in other markup languages
          conflicts with PmWiki 1 ='s convention
      /class/ ... //  
          too confusing with other uses of / (especially filenames and urls)
      ~~class ... ~~  
          tildes unavailable on some keyboards
      §§class ... §§ 
          § unavailable on US keyboards
      %class% ... %% 
          conflicts with inline wikistyles, hard to differentiate
      [%class%] ... [%%]
          hard to type on some keyboards, also poor analogy to [=...=]
      [%class% ... %%]
          hard to type on some keyboards
      |%class ... |%
          wrong mnemonic -- '|' is a horizontal separator, not a vertical one

Thus, if we're to use something besides >>...<< we need a suitable
alternative.

Pm