[Pmwiki-users] More on attachments

Jonathan Scott Duff duff at pobox.com
Mon Nov 25 08:27:03 CST 2002


On Sun, Nov 24, 2002 at 08:12:05PM -0600, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> Interesting idea.  But I'm not sure that it works.  I think most people
> think of the style as occuring before the text rather than after.  And
> if we go towards content-based markup (as opposed to rendering-based markup)
> then it might make more sense to have the style before the text rather than
> afterwards.
> 
> I.e., I think that
> 
>    %bookreference%  The Mythical Man Month %%
> 
> makes a bit more sense than
> 
>    {{The Mythical Man Month %bookreference}}

Indeed.  You don't want to make the mistake of end-loading the syntax
too much; only where necessary or appropriate.  Perl made that mistake
on it's regular expressions:

	$foo =~ m/some possibly long pattern here/im;

We don't know until the end how the stuff in the middle should be
interpreted.  English has the same problem with certain punctuation: 

	Look out for the falling logs!

While reading that sentence you have to scan ahead to the end to see
that it's supposed to be an exclamation.

-Scott
-- 
Jonathan Scott Duff
duff at cbi.tamucc.edu




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