[pmwiki-users] Empty <p> when using %defiine%. Why?

[Marc Cooper]

Patrick R. Michaud said...
> On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 11:58:16AM +0100, Marc Cooper wrote:
> > Patrick R. Michaud said...
> 
> > Perhaps I'm stretching things a bit by using floats as a formatting 
> > mechanism for the #wikitext part of the page rather than simply for 
> > floating a box or an image. 
> 
> You're totally within the intended design.  There's just a bug,
> which I'll fix in 2.1.11.

Excellent. Thanks.
 
> > However, it works - mostly - and is a 
> > fantastically powerful feature. Being able to dynamically format groups 
> > and pages - and allow the editors the same control on their pages - 
> > without having to edit a CSS is, I think, groundbreaking.
> 
> Yes, this is why I did something like WikiStyles in the first place. :-)

It's a very clever idea and execution. Basics, like changing colours and 
fonts, are very useful, of course, but being able to style pages on the 
fly is terrific. Frankly, it overcomes a lot of the problems that come 
with trying to manage CSS - not that there is any management with CSS 
;-) If I hadn't come across the View Style Information (Ctrl+Shift+Y) in 
the Web Developer extension to Firefox then I might never have survived 
working with CSS.

BTW, while I'm in tip mode, I only recently discovered the built-in 
Firefox feature: View Selection Source. So simple, so effective.

> It especially bugs me that CSS doesn't have a good mechanism to define
> new classes based on existing classes (which WikiStyles does, of course).

Yes, it's ridiculous. Heck, I'd prefer multiple inheritance in CSS. What 
do we get: "cascading".

And yes, I added some of my existing styles into local.css and then 
extended them with wikistyles; I nearly fell of my chair!

Being able to do, say [1]:

%define=fred class=greybox color=#666666 padding=1em float=right%
>>fred<< world
>><<
%fred border=dotted color=green padding=0.5em% the
>>fred color=blue<< rules
>><<
%fred color=red text-decoration=underline% PmWiki
%fred%Fred says:
[[<<]]

is quite something. Suddenly CSS becomes creative, rather than  bit of a 
chore.

-- 
Best,
Marc

[1] Here's an example greybox for anyone interested:
.greybox {
	background-color	: #f5f5f5;
	padding		: 5px;
	margin			: 1em 0 1em 0;
	border			: 1px #999999 solid;
}