[Pmwiki-users] Re: more --signature markup thoughts

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Feb 09, 2004 at 02:34:33PM +0100, Christian Ridderstr?m wrote:
> 
> As a general question... how important is it that the signature markup
> resembles the appearance? I.e., if it should appear as '--' (or as
> —), should the markup then contain '--'?

In general, I think that markup should always resemble the output when
possible, otherwise it should be made visible.

> Then I started thinking about what a signature is, and it's purpose:
> [...]
> Is this what we all mean by a "signature", or are we thinking of other 
> uses for this markup as well? Would we like to use the markup just to 
> refer to a person? (E.g. '[[~Pm]] wrote that...')

Well, after your excellent analysis I think that we're not really
looking for a signature as much as an easy way to reference identities--
while '--' has become a common wiki convention for indicating signatures,
it probably has too many other meanings in text to be useful as markup.
So, we need something else that can denote an identity, and it might as
well be something that can be used in text as well as at the end of
a line.

Bear in mind that my conception of author identities is that names
shouldn't be limited to WikiWords--i.e., I should be able to call myself
"Patrick Michaud" and not just "PatrickMichaud".  So, if we allow
identities in text then there has to be something that marks the end
of the identity string, throwing out markup such as "~~username".
That leaves me with the following choices:

in text:                         as a signature:
  1.  ~Patrick Michaud~            -- ~Patrick Michaud~
  2.  ~~Patrick Michaud~~          -- ~~Patrick Michaud~~
  3.  [[~Patrick Michaud]]         -- [[~Patrick Michaud]]
  4.  {{~Patrick Michaud}}         -- {{~Patrick Michaud}}
  5.  ~{{Patrick Michaud}}         -- ~{{Patrick Michaud}}
  6.  ~PatrickMichaud              -- ~PatrickMichaud

Of these my preference thus far is #4, as it helps to reinforce the
idea that identities are free link text.  I've implemented this one on
the beta site if anyone wants to try it out.  But the others are 
reasonable too.

{{~Pm}}