[pmwiki-users] New {$$ } and {( )} markups [Was: Can any of the form recipes do this?]

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 03:15:35PM -0400, The Editor wrote:
> On 4/3/07, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> >> Yes, I appreciate this.  But then again, we do still want the simplest
> >> syntax for the most common uses.  And remember { } is not a markup.
> >
> >Perhaps not, but you keep missing my point that there may be many markups
> >that use {...} as part of the markup.
> 
> ZAP would not mess up any such markup, though such a markup might mess
> with a ZAP form.  But the problem then would be that that is bad
> markup? Not really with ZAP.  Right?

That's not how I would look at it.  To recipes and admins should have 
great freedom to define "uncommon" sequences such as {{...}},
{{{...}}}, [{...}],  '{...}', /{...}/, etc. as markup.  Unfortunately,
ZAP seems to be saying that things fitting the pattern {...}
(which includes all of the markups I just listed) may be
a ZAP field substitution.  IOW, ZAP's single-curly syntax is
precluding the future use of a lot of potential markup sequences.

Just to prove that this isn't entirely theoretical, the
CREOLE markup specification says that {{{...}}} is used for
inlined monospace text.  ZAP's definition would seem to prevent
some words from being able to appear within {{{...}}},
because the inner curlies could be interpreted in some
situations as ZAP field substitutions.  If someone asks me
which of {{{...}}} or {...} causes the problem, I definitely
point at the {...} markup, because there are _many_ more places
where {...} might appear that isn't intended to be a
field substitution (including normal text!), but very few 
places that {{{...}}} is likely to cause a conflict.

> Though it's not all documented, there are some nice features in ZAP's
> {(time)} function already.  

Could you summarize them quickly for me?

Pm