[pmwiki-users] RFC: Core candidate offerings

[Bronwyn Boltwood]

On 4/1/06, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> In the proposal just sent, one could do:
>
>     %book% Here's a book indented paragraph. Lorem ipsum
>     dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Etiam
>     diam tellus, dapibus vitae, sagittis eu, aliquam sit.
>
>     %book% amet, sapien. Donec rutrum ante sed metus.
>     Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci
>     luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae.
>
>     %book% Pellentesque commodo ultricies nisi. Fusce
>     vitae quam. Duis dolor. Mauris tincidunt, nisi sit.
>
> and the %book% style could suppress the vertical whitespace
> between paragraphs.  However, I agree that an author might
> prefer to write/see:
>
>     \    %book% Here's a book indented paragraph. Lorem ipsum
>     dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Etiam
>     diam tellus, dapibus vitae, sagittis eu, aliquam sit.
>     \    %book% amet, sapien. Donec rutrum ante sed metus.
>     Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci
>     luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae.
>     \    %book% Pellentesque commodo ultricies nisi. Fusce
>     vitae quam. Duis dolor. Mauris tincidunt, nisi sit.

Should I wish to display an entire wiki with book-style paragraphs, I
will edit the site styles to produce it, and markup up my paragraphs
as usual.  Book paragraphs are readable in books.  Plain text
paragraphs with blank lines are readable on screen in miserable
conditions.  We have the paragraph markup that we do because it's
simple, natural, and works in a browser textarea, where we can't use
tabs.

For one page, I might use one of the proposals above...but I would
probably not make one page different from the rest without a damned
good reason.  The second one especially makes it difficult to see
where one paragraph begins and another ends.

----

As a semantic markup geek, I don't particularly like the vspace
paragraphs.  I can't help feeling they're somehow superfluous, and
that we should be able to use margins and padding to provide
whitespace where desired.  But I am not crying out for their removal,
because I have not got a solution to the more obscure or complex
problems that vspace paragraphs were designed to solve.

I sometimes need to turn them off, but only when writing skin
furniture into wikipages, where I need very precise output that will
be heavily styled, in which case I've employed something like div.nav
p.vspace {display:none;}.  I can see the use of having an explicit
paragraph markup for such specialized pages.

I agree that it would be nice to be able to create multiple paragraphs
in a list item, or have one paragraph flow naturally around a list. 
This is harder than you would think in most word processors, too, when
you start using styles instead of treating them as typewriters.

As for what the blank lines *mean*, that is not obvious and
predictable.  Sometimes they're meant semantically, sometimes
presentationally, and sometimes we're just fumbling for the desired
output.  When there are several things the author could have wanted,
the markup engine cannot know which one is right.  One paragraph
following another is the easiest case, and it's not what Pm wants our
opinions on.  He wants to know what we think about the hard stuff.

Finally, Pm, you are right that real live paragraphs often contain other blocks.

Bronwyn