[pmwiki] Re: [Pmwiki-users] Whitepaper about markup strategy

[Bernhard.Weichel at t-online.de]

Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>
> That said, I do think I should give some indication of my thinking on
> where this all might be headed, so that people aren't concerned that
> the PmWiki-world is about to undergo a major shift.

Thanks for raising this. Causing a major shift was never my intention!

> Second, while structured markup is good, most (non-technical) authors
> do not write in a structured manner.  For such an author to be
> comfortable with editing a page, the markup has to look something like the
page
> itself. And somehow I have trouble seeing that

As being involved in markup for a couple of years - non technical users
want the "do what I mean" button. So they want a WYSIWYG stuff (a collegue
of mine propose to integrate Typo3's rich text field when I showed him
PmWiki).
But, to be honest I am somewhat tired that any discussion ends in the
statment
that the markup reluctance of non-technical should prevent technical authors
from getting more if they want more.

> Third, as I often tell others, I fairly strongly reject the claim that
> "authors don't have to use the advanced markup if they don't want to".
> I don't think that's true in a collaborative environment.  If

Collaboration means that the collaborators are somewhat on the same level.
So if there is collaboration in a particular enviroment, why shoudn't they
have advanced markup. I am thinking of e.g. a bug reporting wiki, where
the markup could even be generated using forms.

> Maybe I'm just missing the point.  But if we're willing to allow
> things
> like [.b_name]...[.e_name] in the markup, then why bother with a whole
> new markup syntax?  Let's just use XML/HTML directly and say
> <name>...</name>.

Patrick, this is fairly correct. I was driven by the fact that I did not
manage to define customized markup in xml-style due to the fact that HTML
markup characters
are preserved in the very first step of PmWiki page processing.
Otherwise I would never have proposed any other markup style.

And I would not have tried to workout a strategy if it wouldn't take so much
time to collect all the tips and tricks from various pages in the
documentation,
pmwiki.php and inspecting sources of interesting pages. I see lots of tricks
being performed to achieve a particular layout which might be smashed as
soon as one wants to introduce themes.

Not that I claim about the quality of documentation - it is much more than
elsewhere, and I have the chance to contribute for improvement.

> wiki engines.  However, I also recognize some of Bernhard's comments
> about difficulty with adding new structural markup sequences to
> PmWiki,
> and I'm quite willing to make changes to pmwiki.php to facilitate
> the addition of such sequences, even if I don't plan to use any of
> them
> in PmWiki's "default" configuration.

Thanks, we will see.

--b