[Pmwiki-users] intuitive learning

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 12:14:54PM -0500, Lloyd Budd wrote:
> On 26-Feb-04, at 11:48, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> >On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 08:37:14AM -0500, Lloyd Budd wrote:
> >>Why does
> >>	[[{{philosophy}}values]]
> >>displays as "[1]" , but
> >>
> >>	[[{{philosophy}} values]]
> >>displays as "values"?  What is the feature here?
> 
> >So, in your first example above, ?, PmWiki is
> >treating the "values" part as part of the free link, and since there's
> >no space after the link name, it's displayed as a citation link  
> >("[1]").
> >There's probably a reasonable argument to be made that this isn't very
> >intutitive, but it is consistent.  
> 
> Interesting dilemma.  Assuming that people would only ever do [[{{free 
> link}}text]] because they do not understand all of  pmwiki's power, I 
> think the question becomes, what is the likely reason for someone to 
> make this mistake, and is the current implementation intuitive for 
> identifying the problem and allowing for unassisted correction?
> 
> I think the answer to these questions suggest that it would be better 
> to render 'philosophyvalues'.  

This was discussed at some length when free links were first implemented
in PmWiki, and at the time we decided that since every other occurrence
of [[<something> text]] was displayed as "text", we shouldn't break that
model just because <something> was a free link, as that would also
cause confusion.

> Then the question becomes does the 
> current design support such a rendering -- my limited experience with 
> parser development suggests that this will be unlikely, and so the cost 
> may be too great to "fix" this.

>From a programming perspective it can actually be changed without too much
difficulty--PmWiki is quite flexible in that respect.  From a "how does 
this impact existing PmWiki installations" perspective, it may indeed be 
too high a cost.

> >It might also be worthwhile to introduce the convention that the
> >[[reference alttext]] syntax allows page titles instead of WikiWords
> >for the reference part, eliminating the need for the free link markup
> >for single-word page names.  Thus one could write [[Philosophy values]]
> >instead [[{{philosophy}} values]].  Any votes in favor/against?
> If this is generalized, I have a STRONG ;-) vote for this.

Just to make sure I'm clear, note that markup such as [[Philosophy values]], 
if enabled, would still display as "values".

Another thought I just had--it ought to be possible for me to change the
free link pattern a bit so that markup such as

    {{philosophy }}values 

would work.  This would still link to a page named "Philosophy", but 
would render with "philosophy values" as the link text ( as opposed to
"{{philosophy}} values", which would only use "philosophy" as the link 
text.)  But I'll admit this is really getting "out there".

> This relates to my previous message on this thread where I  (subtlety) 
> suggest that it would be amazing if PMWiki ignored case in resolving 
> page titles (and groups when with page title).

I might be able to make this work as a local customization in a future
major release.  However, one often gets this behavior in some Windows 
installations because filenames are case-insensitive there, and several 
admins have asked me how to fix it so that page titles are again case 
sensitive (which just goes to show that there are differing opinions).

Spacing of WikiWords in titles also becomes a bit tricky when the
capitals are missing, and some things just aren't the same in a
different case (e.g., "TheyWentToGetHer" vs. "TheyWentTogether", 
"Therapist" vs. "TheRapist", etc.).

Pm