[pmwiki-users] New pages link

H. Fox haganfox at gmail.com
Wed Mar 30 17:01:34 CST 2005


On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 16:37:13 -0600, Patrick R. Michaud
<pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> 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.

That's true.  If you pointed to it and asked an HTML-unaware newbie
"what is that?" you'd find few, if any, who would answer that it's a
form.

>  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.

Maybe (:searchinput :) and {:newpageinput:} then?  "Input" is a
component of the single-input forms (perhaps the only visible one) and
the word seems more intuitive than "box".

> 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.

That would be a good feature.

Hagan



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