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

Nathan Jones nathanj
Tue Mar 2 15:59:44 CST 2004


Jonathan Scott Duff wrote:
>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.

Agreed. While providing a lot of HTML-like markup could be a bad idea,
providing flexibility is (IMO) a good idea.

Pm wrote:
>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.  

So, the question is: how likely is it that hard things will become
common? In my case, even though I know I can use advanced things like
[[table]], I tend not to. Not just because I want to keep the markup
simple for other authors, but because using simple markup is so much
quicker for general stuff.

However, some pages call for something a little more advanced, and I
appreciate the fact that I can achieve them with PmWiki.

I guess the difficult thing when creating new markup is trying to
determine how intuitive it is and for whom it is intuitive. I see
propsals on this mailing list that, while certainly not HTML-like, don't
give me an idea of what the markup does.

One last thought: the simplest markup is the most common, so even someone
who initially doesn't associate !!! with headings will pick it up. For
less frequent markup, there's not the constant reminder of repitition, so
it helps to be verbose. I can look at a page with [[table]], [[div]], or
[[image]] and think "I haven't done this for a while, but I can see what
it's for and will refer to documentation for more info".

>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.

Sounds like a reasonable proposal. And having a means to add a title
attribute to links could be useful.

-- 
Nathan Jones



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