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

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 02:34:26PM -0600, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 08:43:53PM +0100, Christian Ridderstr??m wrote:
> [ snip ]
> > 
> > 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?  
> 
> Perhaps I've been steeped in perl too long, but "easy things easy and
> hard things possible" seems to apply quite well to wiki too.  Witness
> the alternate table syntax.  The simpler syntax works for most
> situations, but when you want to do something complicated, the other,
> slightly more complicated syntax lets you.

The problem with "easy things easy and hard things possible" in a
collaborative context is that if "hard things possible" becomes
"hard things common" then a rather sizeable portion of people are
excluded from participating.  

> Pm may balk at the overloaded double brackets, but there's lots of
> other punctuation characters we can try  :)

Looks like I'm fighting an uphill battle on this one, so I think I'll
withdraw my proposal of using URL syntax to specify alt= and other 
image attributes, and just put it back into the WikiStyle syntax
(and fix the bug there that started this discussion in the first place).
I just felt that it would make more sense if alt= information was
more closely tied to the image URL than WikiStyles permit, and if the
alt-text was written after the image URL instead of before, since
alt-text tends to be parenthetical anyway.

A syntax like

   http://www.example.com/path/image.gif=="Alt Text" 

has promise, but part of the advantage to me for the proposed syntax
was that it could be easily fit into the existing parse rules for URLs
and images.  The above becomes much more difficult because it's no
longer a simple $UrlPathPattern, but now a $UrlPathPattern that depends
on the existence of .gif or .jpg in the middle of the URL path, and I
don't feel that this syntax by itself is a significant enough improvement
to warrant the magnitude of changes required.

One last gasp...what about something like:

   http://www.example.com/path/image.gif[Alt Text]

where the [Alt Text] becomes a generic part of all URL markup (part of
the $UrlPathPattern), used to specify the "alt=" attribute for image 
tags and the "title=" attribute for other links.  Width, height, and 
the like would still be specified by WikiStyles.  We could also use
some other character besides square brackets to surround "Alt Text",
but it needs to be something that wouldn't normally be found following
a URL in text.

Pm