[Pmwiki-users] Re: Pmwiki new version

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 01:26:11PM +1200, John Rankin wrote:
> On Wednesday, 9 June 2004 12:23 PM, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> >The points that it looks like inline markup and awkward to type 
> >have validity, though.  Perhaps awkwardness is not a big problem
> >since (I think) directives tend to occur in pages much less frequently 
> >than other markups.  
> 
> A point which your later paragraph rather undermines. This may
> get a *lot* of use.

Touch?!  :-)

>      One of the benefits of [[link syntax]] is that it's easy to
>      type -- repeating characters is a good thing (cf @@, '', %%, ||)

A very good point.  But I also think the that the markup for directives 
should look distinctively like a "container", in the sense that [[...]], 
((...)), [:...:], have distinct start and end character sequences.  This
in contrast to things like @@, '', %%, $$ which use the same sequence
for start and end.  In particular, things like

   $$notitle$$$$noheader$$$$nofooter$$

get hard to visually parse and are prone to mistakes--in fact, while 
typing this I first mis-entered it as

   $$notitle$$$$noheader$$nofooter$$

Yes, one could instead write

   $$notitle$$ $$noheader$$ $$nofooter$$

and it looks a little better--but (at least in current implementations) 
the spaces cause it to generate slightly different output.  Contrast
this with

   [:notitle:][:noheader:][:nofooter:]

and I think it's much cleaner.  Containers also help tremendously 
with the other markups--i.e.

   [:table border='1' cellspacing='0':]
   [:title Welcome to pmwiki.org :]

look much nicer to me than things without an obvious start and end
pattern.

So, if we go with characters that repeat as well as have distinctive
start and ends, we're basically left with 

   [[directive param]]  - already used for links
   {{directive param}}  - reserved from 0.6 free links
   ``directive param''  - difficult to type, occurs in text, may have
                          other useful meanings such as quotations
   <<directive param>>  - may look too much like HTML, esp <<table ...>> 
                          and <<div>>
   ((directive param))  - used by other links

I ordered this in terms of "most troublesome to least troublesome",
but none of them strike me as being very good.  So then it's a question
of "containerized sequences" versus "doubled characters", and I think
I lean toward the former as being more important.  But that's just
my opinion at the moment--let's keep discussing it and see where it
leads.  :-)

Pm

P.S.: Even though it's technically the same sequence, //...// *looks*
like a container of sorts and so it might be useful.  However, I still
don't like the looks of

    //noheader////nofooter////notitle//

and those trailing slashes make me think of \\ (line break).