[pmwiki-users] Wikiwords

marc gmane at auxbuss.com
Sat Jan 20 10:29:44 CST 2007


Patrick R. Michaud said...
> Lately I've been giving serious thought to turning
> off all wikiword parsing by default in the core, and
> would like feedback.
> 
> Here's the background and history.  Prior to version 2.1,
> PmWiki had wikiwords enabled in the core by default,
> such that any CamelCase word would be automatically
> treated as a link to another page.  There was an
> option to disable wikiword linking, however.
> 
> Starting with version 2.1, we switched the core
> default so that wikiwords would not automatically
> be treated as links to other pages.  Sites that wanted
> to have wikiword links enabled simply set
> 
>     $LinkWikiWords = 1;
> 
> However, even for sites that don't enable wikiword links,
> PmWiki still parses wikiwords in the source markup, and 
> surrounds them with <span class='wikiword'>...</span> in 
> the output.  This is intended to make it easier for sites
> to find older wikiword links that may no longer work
> when $LinkWikiWords is turned off.
> 
> Unfortunately, this additional parsing and output step
> sometimes interferes with wikiwords that naturally
> occur in other instances (e.g., character entities
> such as "&AElig;" or colors such as "#FFFF00").  Since
> most site generally don't visually distinguish wikiwords
> from surrounding text, it's not at all obvious what is
> happening.
> 
> So, I'm thinking that now would be a good time to have
> all wikiword parsing disabled by default in the core.
> For sites that are still using wikiword links, the
> $LinkWikiWords = 1; setting would still enable wikiword
> parsing and linking, same as it does now.  Sites that
> want exactly the current 2.1 behavior, where wikiwords
> are parsed and tagged but not linked, would do:
> 
>     $LinkWikiWords = 0;
>     include_once("$FarmD/scripts/wikiwords.php");
> 
> Defaulting PmWiki to not parsing wikiwords by default
> would clean up a number of confusing issues for authors,
> as well as potentially reduce the time needed to render
> pages (the markup rule used to find/process wikiword
> links can be a little slow, and not needed for sites that
> aren't doing anything with wikiwords).
> 
> Any comments, either for, against, or otherwise?

Another vote for making wikiwords default to off.

As always, you will provide the option for those that need them, so it's 
hard to fault the move. I'm in favour of making as much as possible 
optional, which PmWiki pretty much allows this already, so adding 
wikiwords to the list is a good thing, in my eyes.

-- 
Cheers,
Marc





More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list