[Pmwiki-users] Re: Re: Image sizes, alt tags, and more (was: Image display resizing problem)

[Christian Ridderström]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 12:31:57PM -0600, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote:

> > However, it would be nice to have a simple syntax for setting the alt
> > attribute as I think that will be quite common.  Hmm.
> > 	[[image WikiPub:toast.jpg alt=flaming_poptarts!]]
> > 	WikiPub:toast.jpg#alt=flaming_poptarts!
> > 
> > 	[[image http://foo.com/cgi-bin/mapper.cgi?parm1 alt=My_Map]]
> > 	http://foo.com/cgi-bin/mapper.cgi?parm1&dummy=.gif#alt=My_Map
> 
> Oh jeepers, please don't do this to me.  Yet *another* interpretation
> for double brackets?  
> 
> "Well, double brackets are used to be able to specify alternate 
> text for a link, except when they begin with 'image', in which case 
> they're an alternate syntax for image URLs to let you specify alt= 
> text, and you can't specify alt= text if the image is being used as 
> the text of a link, because PmWiki doesn't support the  [[WikiWord 
> [[image http://foo.com/cgi-bin/mapper.cgi?parm1 alt=My_Map]]]] markup, 
> not that anyone can figure out what it's supposed to be anyway, and
> if using the brackets you have to figure out yourself if you want 
> align=left or align=right added to float the image because PmWiki 
> can't add it for you...  sigh."

I actually think of the double brackets as a kind of operator that
evaluates the "expression" inside it... :-) Anyway, would it help
(readability/understandability) if we wrote it like this instead:

	[[image=http://foo.com/image.gif alt=Bla_bla_bla width=....]]

Here's a completely different way of doing it:

	%image=http://foo.com/image.gif width=250px%Alternate text%%

although that's a bit backward... and your example with a link to WikiWord 
becomes weird... would it be:

	%image=http://foo.com/image.gif%[[WikiWord alternate text]]%%

or

	[[WikiWord %image=http://foo.com/image.gif%alternate text%%]]

But I think all of this is really overdoing it... shouldn't a wiki be easy 
to use, and if that's the case, why should you be fiddling with stuff like 
'width', 'height' etc?  (Alternate text might be motivated although, but I 
doubt it's used often enough to motivate not using a wiki style to set the 
alternate text).

/Christian

> We might as well just write <img src='....' alt='...' />.

Except that then the author might think that arbitrary HTML is valid :-P

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m                           http://www.md.kth.se/~chr