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

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Tue Mar 2 13:21:51 CST 2004


On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 08:43:53PM +0100, Christian Ridderstr?m wrote:
> 
> 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).

...because one of PmWiki's stated primary goals is to assist in the 
collaborative authoring of web sites, and in the current formulation of
web standards it's quite important that web sites be able to specify 
alt= text for images.  For many organizations that might wish to use
PmWiki meaningful alt= attributes are actually required as a matter of 
policy or law.

> > We might as well just write <img src='....' alt='...' />.
> 
> Except that then the author might think that arbitrary HTML is valid :-P

Exactly, which is why I've been avoiding that.  I broke down a year or
so and wrote [[table ...]] just to solve an immediate need that I had for
tables that couldn't be solved with with the || syntax.  Also, I figured
the use of [[table]] would be relatively rare, and it definitely throws
off new authors.  But, in the past few days we've seen requests for 
[[div ...]], and today I see [[image ...]], which unlike [[table]]
will be quite common and very likely to frighten off new authors.  
Pretty soon we no longer have a simplified or intuitive markup language, 
and if the markup isn't significantly simpler we might as well be 
editing HTML.

Pm



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