[Pmwiki-users] intuitive learning

[Lloyd Budd]

On 2-Mar-04, at 12:41, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> 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.

How does what I am proposing break that model?  My suggestion is 
specifc to when there is no space between the {{free link}} and text , 
as in {{free link}}text.  When within a [[citation]], I can only 
imagine this to be a user error.  The proposed rendering would make 
this error more obvious.  I do not really care that much either way -- 
at least not until people come asking me what is going on ;-)

Thank you,
Lloyd