[pmwiki-users] New pages link

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Wed Mar 30 16:37:13 CST 2005


On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 03:32:20PM -0600, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote:
> I like the second to last one but it really seems like this and the
> searchbox and other such formy things could use some conceptual
> unification. I.e., (:searchbox:), (:newpagebox:), (:blahbox:) are all
> well and good, but ETOOMANYBOXES. And some may not even be boxes! (This
> is why I like "newpageform" as it feels like it should be more formy
> than boxy because it would make sense for the form to have more than
> just a page name)

Well, I was thinking similar things as I was driving around today,
that perhaps these should be (:searchform:), (:newpageform:), etc.

But, countering that, if we step outside of the HTML world for a 
second, I think the word "form" tends to refer to things that have 
multiple input fields and not just a single one.  It's tax time in
the U.S., and tax "forms" tend to contain multiple "boxes", and
Google's definition of "form" says "a printed document with spaces
in which to write".  In the case of the interface to these elements,
there's just a single input (the box) and an activator button.

In some sense I think that we may be better off keeping "form" for
the more complex inputs--think WikiForms and FGS, and leaving
simplistic single-input forms as "box".  We might want to
reserve (:searchform:) for some sort of future "advanced search" 
that provides more options.  

But I'm not committed to any interpretation at the moment, and
it wouldn't be difficult to make "box" and "form" effectively
act as synonyms if we ever needed it.

Comments and discussion greatly encouraged.

Pm




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