[pmwiki-users] utf inclusion - odd behavior.

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Thu Feb 15 11:51:03 CST 2007


On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 05:00:26PM +0100, Tom Lederer wrote:
> >Effectively you're suggesting that PmWiki be distributed without
> >any documentation pages at all...?
> 
> Uhm... yes, effectively i do.
> 
> As a matter of fact, (at least to me) the Documentation is of little  
> use at least, if it is on my server online.
> 
> And as said, with all the functional parts in Site.* the PmWiki Group  
> basically is the documetation "localized" in English (from my POV).  
> Of course it is the reference documentation language, and it is of  
> help to the admin.

Actually, the documentation is meant to be of use to authors as 
well as the admin.  

When I first started looking at wiki engines in 2001, one of the 
things that greatly bothered me is that they didn't come 
pre-packaged with any documentation for wiki authors.  In other 
words, I had to either write documentation for my authors, or 
point them to another site with instructions that often contained 
pages about more than just using the software.

So, when I wrote my own wiki, I decided that it should have 
documentation for authors bundled with it.

That said, I agree that for many sites the bundled documentation 
gets in the way.  But to keep things usable for new PmWiki admins,
I'd prefer to continue to bundle documentation and then provide
an easy way to exclude it.

> To go a step further: Even the functional parts in localized sites  
> (i.e. PmWikiDe.XLPage etc.) seem to be in the wrong place (for my  
> taste), as i consider the PmWiki(XX) groups as documentation mainly.  
> As a naive (as in top off my head) suggestion i would rather put them  
> in the site group. 

Here we're seeing the effects of evolution at play.  We had localization
options available years before we came up with the custom Site.*
group for functional pages.  Originally most or all the functional 
pages were in the PmWiki group, and so it made sense to have the
language-specific functional pages in their respective PmWiki(XX)
groups.

Then with PmWiki 2.0 we introduced the Site group, and since then
we've added a lot more pages into that group.  The only "functional"
pages that PmWiki 1.0 had were Search, EditQuickReference, and
UploadsQuickReference.  Starting with 2.0 we've added AuthUser,
Blocklist, EditForm, PageActions, InterMap, PageNotFound, etc.
And until recently there hasn't really been a strong push
to go back an re-evaluate how to handle the non-english pages,
or the bundled documentation.

So, I agree we need some re-thinking on the issue... using
language code prefixes in Site.* makes good sense, although
part of me wants to just introduce Site(XX) groups.  And in
some ways suffixes seem to read better than prefixes
(e.g., Site.EditQuickReference-De).

Anyway, I'll think about it a while and see if I can come
up with some good answers to the overall problem.  Thanks!

Pm



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